LIKE 12 - No more consultants

LIKE leaped purposefully and confidently in to its second year with a talk facilitated by Chris Collison that took a gallop through some of the main points in his latest book, No more consultants.

My hopefully not too simplistic summary of his argument is that organisations too often turn to external consultants when they already have the required skills and knowledge within the company.

Of course, knowing that you have these skills and knowledge is one thing but finding them and exploiting them is another.

Chris covered this in as much detail as his 45 slot allowed and we had an instructive run through maturity models (decide what is important to you and ways to measure how good you are at it), the river model (which summarises each team's self assessment against the model) and some tips for getting those with the skills and knowledge to share with those who need it the most.

Chris' talk was rich in content, well paced and delivered with creditability (it was practice not theory) and it set the evening up nicely.

What followed was some food, more drink and lots of conversations. And I mean a lot of conversations.

The semi-official end of the meeting was 8pm but only a few left then and the debate was still going strong at 9pm.

And it was still going pretty well when I finally left around 10pm!

If you can judge the success of an individual LIKE meeting by the time that it ends then you can judge the success of the whole venture by the number of people left on the waiting list for the meetings and LIKE is now looking for a larger venue. Success indeed.