THIRD-PARTY CONSULTING

The most traditional third-party process involves the lone consultant who studies the situation and makes recommendations for improvement. The consultant may come from inside the organization or be an outsider. Sometimes the third party is a team of people from inside the organization that is given the charge of coming up with recommendations. Often called design teams, these groups may number ten to fifty people, and they have six months, more or less, to work on the project, after which they are expected to return with recommended actions that management can endorse and implement.

Although the design team involves more people than the traditional lone consultant arrangement and members are taken from the organization itself, it still represents a third-party strategy: whenever some individual or group develops a solution for another, it is taking a third-party stance.