Building unanimity through options
Years ago, I had the opportunity to lead a corporate professional services development organization that had the responsibility of developing a standard set of IT-based professional consulting services offerings. The professional services supported business process improvements relevant to our retail and banking clients, plus we had to design the services so that they supported delivery on an international scale. The products of our corporate business consulting services development team were information artifacts related to methods and tools. These enabled the company's 4,000 consultants to deliver IT-based professional services with consistently and at a high level.
Operating across nearly 100 countries, each Country Manager, in effect, ran their consulting practices independently. The loosely coupled organizational structure made it very challenging to build consensus in anything. But I also quickly learned that preferences in methods...