Ethical Behavior is Under Attack,
A Challenge for Consultants

Consultant Ethics

Where can we find models of ethical behavior and integrity? Not from public servants, lawmakers, or office seekers who lie and spread disinformation. 

Regardless of what clients accept in their politics or personal life, they won’t accept unethical behavior from consultants. Clients rely on a consultant’s reputation or testimonials. Some just don’t worry about it. Some are wary, especially if they’ve been burned by an unethical consultant.

Consultant’s Personal Code of Ethics

Consultants should be prepared to answer clients’ questions about ethical issues. A Consultants’ Personal Code of Ethics can help. It might not answer all ethics questions but could possibly eliminate many of the client’s fears and concerns. 

Building Your Code

First, think about what’s important to your typical clients. If necessary, ask them their expectations.

There are Code templates and examples available but use them as guides to design your own Code in your own words. Your service and field might have unique requirements. You may have personal morals and values you need to address. 

Here are ten topics to consider as examples of Consultant Code of Ethics Topics.

1. Integrity: Conduct client interactions with honesty, transparency, and respect.
2. Confidentiality: Keep all client information private. Don’t inadvertently or intentionally disclose it to others. If involving others is necessary, get client permission and/or a signed Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) from the assisting parties.
3. Objectivity: Thoroughly analyze a client’s needs and recommend the appropriate service that fulfills those needs. Resist the temptation to think that every potential client needs your service.
4. Competence: Be qualified to deliver the needed service. If not qualified, admit it and suggest alternative solutions, such as referring the client to a qualified consultant. Don’t experiment at a client’s expense.
5. Conflicts of interest: No conflict of interest will be hidden from clients. Reveal all existing and potential issues that could jeopardize the objectivity of your work with a client.
6. Fees: Disclose all fees and payment schedules so there are no surprises. Acquire the client’s agreement prior to the project start. Renegotiate if the project scope changes.
7. Non-Dependence: Strive to make the client self-sufficient and not need your service after delivery. Don’t perform in a way that makes the client unnecessarily dependent upon you.
8. Client Agreement: Upfront discussions can reveal ethical issues:
   1. Services to be performed and by whom
   2. Results, performance and completion measures
   3. Project duration the & cancellation
   4. Rights to original work produced during the project
9. The “Hard Truth”: Respectfully inform clients if they are the source of the problem. For example, a client engages you to improve employee morale, but the client is dictatorial.
10. Ethical Dilemmas: These occur when a consultant is faced with choices where the “right” or “ethical” path is not obvious. If the dilemma affects the client’s welfare, the consultant should strive to choose in the client’s favor.

I Don’t Need Requirements Documentation

I hear this from entrepreneurs all the time, “I’m too busy creating my product and don’t have the time to create a requirements document.” They claim it’s not worth their time and effort, and that it’s a remnant of corporate dinosaurs. I say you will wander aimlessly in the forest without knowing where you want to go. 

You should identify the functions your product must perform and those that you think would make a major impact. Get all your stakeholders and functions involved such as: marketing (customer profile), design, safety, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, sales, and service.

Writing great requirements for hardware products is crucial for ensuring quality, efficiency, productivity, functionality, and reliability in the global market. Effective requirements serve as the blueprint that guides the entire development and manufacturing process, influencing every stage from design to delivery.

Clarity and Precision

One of the primary attributes of great requirements is clarity. Requirements should be written in clear and unambiguous language that leaves no room for misinterpretation. Precision ensures that all stakeholders—designers, engineers, manufacturers, and testers—understand exactly what is expected. Ambiguity in requirements can lead to misunderstandings, delays, and ultimately, a product that does not meet its intended purpose.

Completeness

Comprehensive requirements cover all aspects of the product's functionality, performance, and interface. They should outline what the product should do, specifying boundaries and constraints clearly. This completeness ensures that the product meets all user needs and regulatory requirements.

Consistency and Coherence

Consistency ensures that requirements do not contradict each other and are aligned with the overall product vision. Coherence ties individual requirements together into a cohesive whole, reflecting a unified understanding of the product's goals across different teams and disciplines.

Verifiability and Testability

Verifiable requirements are specific and measurable, allowing for objective evaluation during development and testing phases. Testable requirements facilitate the creation of test cases that validate whether the product meets its specifications. This attribute is critical for ensuring that the product performs as expected under various conditions.

Modifiability and Traceability

Requirements should be adaptable to changes in technology, market demands, or regulatory requirements without compromising the integrity of the product. Traceability ensures that each requirement is linked back to its source and rationale, providing a clear audit trail from conception to implementation.

Realism and Feasibility

Realistic requirements account for practical considerations such as time, resources, and technological constraints. They should be achievable within the given constraints without requiring extraordinary effort or resources.

Collaboration and Communication

Effective requirements encourage collaboration and communication among all stakeholders. They should be accessible and understandable to everyone involved in the product development process, fostering a shared understanding and alignment of goals.

In conclusion, great requirements for hardware products embody clarity, completeness, consistency, verifiability, modifiability, realism, and encourage collaboration. By adhering to these attributes, companies can enhance product quality, improve efficiency in development processes, increase productivity, ensure functionality meets user expectations, and enhance overall reliability. Clear, precise, and well-defined requirements serve as the cornerstone for successful hardware product development, contributing to customer satisfaction and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

—Mark Fling

RPCN Technical Forum

As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, we’re going to make a minor change to the Tech Forum starting with August’s forum. It’ll still hold its primary focus of helping our members and guests get answers to their technology questions, but we thought we’d make the Tech Forum a more valuable resource to our members and guests with some tweaks to it.

We ended the June Tech Forum with a brainstorming session for ideas on things we might add to it or change. Several of the ideas that were brought up for consideration were:

• Starting the forum with a short update on technology in the news
• Including a segment where our participants talk about the tech they’ve recently started using
• Having a program for the 2nd half of the forum
• Having an occasional full session program about a particular technology related topic
• Giving individuals an opportunity to submit topics to cover prior to the meeting and then advertising the topics that were preselected to discuss
• Resuming the practice of publishing on the RPCN website the questions that are answered in the Tech Forum
• Including a segment where our participants can tell us about the workarounds they’ve come up with to make the tech they use even more effective for them
• Having a “look back in time” segment where we talk about the technology we were using five, 10, 20, or X years ago and see just how far things have come in a fairly short time
• Having a theme to what we are planning to discuss in a particular month; e.g. one month the focus is on phone related issues, another it is on laptop/desktop related issues, and another the focus is on a particular type of software, or discussing the pros and cons of a particular phone provider (say Verizon) one month and then a different one (say Sprint) the next month, and so on.

We will be implementing one of these ideas on August 2nd at 8AM. To find out which we chose, you’ll have to join us in person at the Al Sigl Center or virtually via Zoom. We hope you join us and give us feedback on the new choice. We may choose a different idea in a future Tech Forum as we really do want to make this program as beneficial to our members and guests as possible.

Whether you attend the August 2nd meeting or not, we’d love to get your thoughts about the Tech Forum and on how to build on what we’ve had in it the past 30 years. Please send them to TechForum@rochesterconsultants.org.

—Dave Bassett

RPCN Needs Simon Vision Mentors for Fall 2024

The Rochester Professional Consultants Network (RPCN) has provided mentors to the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business (Simon) Simon Vision Consulting (SVC) Program (Simon Vision) for thirteen consecutive semesters. We need mentors for the Fall semester.

If you are unfamiliar with Simon Vision, the program is an effort to increase experiential learning opportunities for Simon’s MBA and MS students. 

• It is a student-run program that usually has 4-5 student members per team, which includes a project manager. 
• Each team typically provides consulting to a local small business for 8 - 12 weeks which is one semester.
• In the semester that will follow, Simon sometimes has another student consulting team take over the next part of the project for the same company.

Participation in the program is voluntary for the students and is not part of the regular Simon curriculum. In addition to the RPCN mentors, there is a faculty adviser who helps the students run the program.

Mentors

We are looking for mentors for the upcoming Fall semester. We’re expecting there to be 12-16 projects in total. We would like to have the same number of mentors as there are projects. If you’d like to become a mentor, please contact me via my information shown at the end of this article.

Projects

We’re also looking for new projects for the Fall semester. If you, a client, or an associate have a well-defined project that is a candidate to be outsourced, Simon Vision could be a great resource to get your project completed. Projects are vetted by the Simon Vision student governing board and the leadership of Simon Vision work with you to define a project that can be successfully completed within these constraints. If your project isn’t selected for inclusion in the Fall semester, don’t lose heart. It still could be accepted in the Spring semester.

The project can be any business problem and Simon Vision teams have successfully completed projects focused on marketing, business strategy, financial planning, operations, competitive analysis, and other topics. Examples of completed projects include: 

• Reviewing ways to decrease seasonal fluctuations in sales
• Developing a financial plan to ask for funding
• Exploring new marketing channels. 

So, you can see that the projects can take on a wide variety of topics and the student teams work for FREE!

Upcoming Presentation

The new President of the Simon Vision, Fadekemi Akindude, will give a presentation about the upcoming semester on September 13th at an RPCN “Learn from the Best” Friday morning meetings. It’ll be a great opportunity to learn about the program if you’re thinking of becoming a mentor and can also give you a good expectation of what’s to come in the current semester if you or a client of yours has signed on to become an SVC client.  Hopefully, it’ll also give you some ideas of what they might work on for YOU in a future semester.

Contact

If you are interested in having an SVC Project Team perform work for you, would like more information about the program, or if you’d like to volunteer to be an RPCN member mentor to a student team, please contact Dave Bassett at dbassett@basstat.com.