How to set up your workstream well
Many consultants lose control of a workstream before real work even starts. This post is for MBB consultants who want to set direction early and build momentum through a clear, structured approach.
The first few weeks on a project are extremely difficult. You don’t know the topic, you don’t know the client.
Insecurities kick in even if you are a tenured consultant. And if you are a newbie, it’s a hundred times harder.
But often, how you start your workstream determines how it will go.
Will you work the whole project reactively, constantly fighting fires?
Or will you work proactively, leading your clients to a great impact?
It’s often decided in the first few weeks, if not days.
In this post, I want to share with you how to start your workstream well.
To help you better understand my points, I want to do it by giving you a real example.
Meet Amy, she’s a first-year consultant at BCG (name changed for privacy reasons).
Her start at the firm was not great. She got a couple of bad projects. Now, she’s fighting with a negative rating.
Of course, that’s affected her confidence and reputation. Even the simplest things became very hard for her to do.
She worked on an organisation redesign case. She was given a new workstream to manage (or a module, as they call it at BCG). She was tasked to look into one large business unit to reorganize and optimize it.
She asked for my help. It was a moment of truth for her. Either she finds a way to build momentum, or she again falls into a reactive mode of working and most likely gets fired soon.
Amy is a member of my coaching program for MBB consultants. She joined recently and just started to learn.
On top of practical coaching, sometimes I help my clients with their real project problems. Because often one strong impulse can help them build momentum. On top of that, it shows them a very practical example of how good problem-solving works in practice.
Amy asked me to look at her document. She wanted to check if she had set up the workstream well.
We jumped on a call. She showed her document.
To be honest, I couldn’t understand much. It was just a bunch of fragmented pages: baseline, pain points, best practice cases, and even some early org. design options.
My first reaction was:
“I think you are missing your approach page.”
What does it mean? Let me explain.
When you set up your workstream, you need to define your approach first.
How are you going to solve this problem for the client? How should your client make design decisions? It should be structured upfront, and you must explain to your clients and partners before you start working.
Otherwise, your clients and partners will be lost and confused very quickly. You will show them random pages, but the bigger picture will be missing. But you won’t even get to your main points, because your managers and partners will not allow you to get there. That’s when it can go down the hill for you.
And this applies not only to org. design projects, but pretty much any workstream you work on.
Okay, how to do it practically?
To be honest, I didn’t have the answer right away. It was not clear how to structure her workstream. It seemed messy and complex.
We continued to discuss and problem-solve what the approach could look like.
One thing I noticed was that she had all these different levers and insights in her mind. She collected them in client interviews.
I really liked what she was telling me. They seemed quite specific and insightful. But I couldn’t see them on the slides. She wasn’t showing her ideas.
That means her partners and clients couldn’t see them either.
I suggested why we don’t use these ideas. Why not put them on a page? Structure them as levers and support each lever with the observations and insights.
It became clear that if she created that slide, it would structure the whole workstream. Because after that, every analysis becomes a deep dive. And that page with levers will hold the whole document together.
Then, she could use it as an anchoring page explaining to clients what she was doing overall and what was being discussed at any meeting.
We agreed that at that time, it was the most important page she had to create.
She shared the draft of that page with me. I didn’t like the quality of that page. I told her that the draft was too simplistic and trivial. And asked her to push for more specificity and insight. The second version was much better.
She texted me the next day saying that the manager really liked that slide and shared that it was actually more than he expected.
That slide immediately became a centerpiece of the workstream and sparked lots of good discussions.
The partner also liked that page and used it to come up with a conceptual slide based on these levers, and they presented it to the client CEO. Clients responded positively. They bought into the whole workstream approach.
All that time, Amy was in the epicenter of these positive discussions. She had built the positive momentum of her workstream.
A few weeks later, she showed me a few flattering feedback emails that the leadership team sent to Amy’s evaluator. That was exactly what she needed at that time to improve her rating situation.
Learnings
Your approach to your workstream is absolutely essential.
As a consultant, you can’t work haphazardly. You must create an anchoring structure that helps your clients understand what you are doing. Without that structure, your clients will be confused and lost.
Every time you meet with clients, you start with that approach. This way, you ground them and remind them of what you are doing.
And then, you can deep dive into specific parts of that approach. And they can follow your logic across many days and weeks of you working on your workstream.
Your managers and partners know that. That is why they get upset if you don’t have an approach page early in your workstream development. They will push you to do that if you can’t do it yourself. But that’s how you will lose the strategic initiative.
That’s how you get negative feedback on your structuring and problem-solving skills. It’s better not to wait until your partners tell you to do that, believe me.
The most common mistake here is when consultants create an elaborate process plan, thinking that it defines the workstream approach.
They start with diagnostics, then design initiatives, and finally go into implementation. But that’s not what the workstream approach means. It’s not about process. It’s about the logical approach to solving your problem.
How to come up with the right approach?
Unfortunately, this one-size-fits-all approach won’t work.
That’s where you must really think deeply. That’s what real problem-solving looks like.
Typically, I would look for some library documents for inspiration. But be careful, don’t copy the approach mindlessly. Make sure it’s tailored to your unique situation and context.
Okay, this is for this topic. I hope it was helpful.
Let me know if you have any questions. Drop a comment below.
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