Consulting is all about people and knowledge
The most important asset of any consulting services business is their people. As is the case with any human capital-driven organization, these companies would not last for a long time without great employees. This is no wonder, since it is essentially their employees that they rent out to solve their clients’ problems. And when talking about “great” employees, this encompasses their personality traits just as much as the knowledge base they build and expand over the years.
Work in these industries is usually organized in projects that are set up for different client engagements. Consequently, it is exactly there where consultants acquire their knowledge that makes them so valuable to their companies. Especially in their early years, employees are expected to work on a large number of different client assignments in order to get maximum exposure to a wide range of business problems, which means a truly fast-paced work environment with lots of information to process.
These projects that can sometimes only last as little as two or three weeks require that everyone in a team quickly get an overall understanding of the issues at hand. After all, consultants are expected to rapidly come up with recommendations and deliver results.
This is a continuous process that usually means going through countless presentations, spreadsheets, and other documents. A lot of additional, relevant information to fully understand a project’s history also comes in the form of emails, take for example those sent to the client to clarify certain points or to follow up on a meeting.
Getting the right information is key, but sometimes hard
There are usually clear roles assigned within a team as to who handles what part of the communication with whom on the client side (which will often be via email). Many times, however, the information contained in these emails is relevant to more than one person and, as a result, needs to be shared across the team.
Many consultants have been in situations where they asked colleagues to forward to them a particular set of emails because they needed to understand how a decision has come about. But the opposite is equally common: being copied on plenty of emails that congest your inbox even though you couldn’t care less at that particular moment as you are focusing on something entirely different.
In our last blog post we discussed how there were adequate solutions to address file sharing requirements for businesses these days—unless we talk about email. Because at Keluro we know how much of a decisive factor efficient knowledge management and sharing information can be, we developed an application that finally turns email into a collaborative asset, while reducing the clutter in your inbox.
Keluro lets you integrate email storage in your project documentation (in a useful way!)
Keluro’s solution (which is currently available for beta testers) runs in a smart, cloud-based, environment that allows you to store your emails in different channels. These channels work similar to shared folders that can be set up for a specific topic, where all contributors can file relevant email conversations and access those of others. Searchability of information is guaranteed for the entire team, no matter at which point a new colleague joins. Easy rights management on a per-channel basis ensures that only those who should actually do get access and that the dissemination of confidential information remains restricted to a specified group of people.
Since Keluro connects with your existing Office 365 account and your Outlook mailbox, integration and usability from day one is as simple for the end user as it is for the IT admin (and no worries, if your company is not yet an Office 365 subscriber chances are they will be very soon – check here if you are not sure whether you are already using it).
Give Keluro a try to see how you will improve efficiency with a knowledge base that serves your needs instead of you having to tediously gather together all the information you need while bombarding your colleagues with copies of email they don’t care to see.
