Most operating model programs can, in principle, be done with internal resources. In practice, the best-run TOM efforts almost always use some external support—but in a very deliberate way. External consultants should amplify your leadership team, not replace it; provide expertise, capacity, and objectivity where you genuinely need them; and then leave behind a stronger organization.
This chapter focuses on:
- When external support is actually justified
- How to scope and structure consultant roles around your leadership team
- How to work effectively with large consulting firms
- How to work with independent consultants, including those from the Umbrex community
18.1 Deciding When External Support Is Justified
Before you bring in any consultants, be explicit about why you are doing it. There are three legitimate reasons to consider external help:
- Expertise – you need capabilities you don’t have in-house
- Capacity – you cannot free enough of your best people without breaking the business
- Neutrality – you need an objective voice to cut through politics or entrenched positions
If none of these is true, you probably don’t need external support—or you need it at a very small scale.
Useful questions to test justification:
Expertise
- Have we led a comparable TOM—similar scale, complexity, and context—in the last few years?
- Do we have internal people who can credibly design end-to-end value streams, target org, tech implications, and the roadmap without major on-the-job learning?
- Are we facing issues (e.g., PMI, carve-out, heavy regulation, multi-country standardization) where specialized experience would materially reduce risk?
Capacity
- Can we put our best line leaders and experts on the TOM for 30–50% of their time without harming current performance?
- Are we trying to run several major change programs in parallel that already stretch the organization?
- Do we have internal program management and change capacity to run a multi-year effort?
Neutrality
- Is there significant misalignment between functions, BUs, or regions that has blocked change for years?
- Will difficult decisions (e.g., where to site hubs, who owns which journeys, what gets standardized) be impossible to resolve without a neutral fact base and facilitation?
- Is there a risk that internal politics will distort what is presented to the executive team?
You are looking for a pattern like:
- “We have strong business leadership but limited TOM design experience and no spare PMO capacity” → external help for design and PMO makes sense.
- “We know what to do, but we can’t get the functions to agree on a shared model” → external help for fact base and facilitation, possibly alongside the CEO, makes sense.
- “We think we should have consultants because everyone else does” → not a good reason.
Also be clear when not to bring in consultants:
- Your strategy isn’t decided yet (consultants will either drift into strategy work you should own, or design a TOM on sand).
- There is no senior sponsor willing to own the TOM (external help won’t fix a leadership vacuum).
- You mainly want to outsource accountability (“let’s get consultants to push through unpopular changes”)—this tends to backfire.
If you can articulate a crisp answer to:
“What can external consultants do for us that we plainly cannot do for ourselves, at the speed and risk level we need?”
…then you are ready to scope.
18.2 Scoping and Structuring Consultant Support Around Your Leadership Team
Once you’ve decided external support is warranted, the most important design choice is this:
Your leadership team owns the TOM. Consultants support. That needs to be reflected in scope, roles, and ways of working.
Think in terms of roles you need filled, not “number of consultants.” Common roles:
- TOM Architect / Design Lead (advisor)
- Helps turn strategy and pain points into an integrated TOM design.
- Brings patterns from other organizations and industries.
- Works closely with your COO/Head of Transformation and key business leaders.
- Program / Transformation Management
- Designs and runs the governance cadence, planning cycles, RAID, and reporting.
- Coordinates workstreams, keeps the roadmap integrated, supports wave leads.
- Often a mix of your people plus some external PMO experts.
- Specialist Design Support
- Deep expertise in specific areas: shared services, digital journeys, data and analytics, risk and controls, location strategy, etc.
- Typically engaged to do targeted sprints: diagnostics, options, and design recommendations.
- Analytics and Benchmarking Support
- Builds initial baselines and value models
- Brings external benchmarks to test ambitions (cost, headcount, spans, service levels).
- Change and Capability-Building Support
- Helps define TOM-related capabilities, design leadership programs, build change plans, and coach key roles.
When you scope an engagement, define:
- Which roles are external vs internal
- E.g., external TOM architect + PMO lead; internal workstream leads and journey owners.
- What success looks like for the external team
- Not “complete 12 decks,” but “we have an agreed TOM blueprint and roadmap, internal leaders can explain and defend it.”
A good structure often has:
- 1–2 senior external advisors (TOM architect, senior PMO or change lead).
- A small core team (often 2–6 consultants) embedded in your design and implementation teams.
- Your own leaders as named owners of each workstream and journey.
From the start, build in exit and transfer:
- Ask: “What will we no longer need them for in 3–6–12 months?”
- Ensure every external role has an internal counterpart shadowing and taking over.
- Make knowledge transfer a deliverable (playbooks, templates, training sessions, not just documents).
If your consulting team is doing all the thinking, talking to all the stakeholders, and presenting all the outputs, you have mis-scoped. The acid test:
Could your leadership team defend the TOM design and roadmap without consultants in the room?
If not, adjust.
18.3 Working Effectively with Large Consulting Firms
Large firms can be very effective in big TOM programs: they bring capacity, a broad toolkit, and global experience. They also come with risks: cost, over-engineering, and the possibility that your own leaders become passengers.
If you choose to work with a large firm, be deliberate.
1. Select for TOM-relevant strength, not brand alone
When you run a selection or RFP process, focus on:
- Evidence of recent TOM work at similar scale and in similar contexts (PMI, carve-out, multi-country, regulated industries).
- Who will actually be on your team (named partner and manager, not just a generic capability slide).
- How they have integrated with client teams before (joint teams vs “consultants in a corner”).
Ask directly:
- “Tell us about a TOM program where you changed course mid-way. What happened and what did you do?”
- “How did you ensure knowledge transfer and avoid permanent dependence on your firm?”
You are testing for realism and humility as much as credentials.
2. Shape the engagement around outcomes and waves
Instead of scoping “one giant TOM project,” structure around:
- Phase 0 / Mobilization – refine TOM brief, create initial roadmap, define value case at a high level.
- Phase 1 / Design and Proof – design TOM blueprint and run 1–2 pilots or MVPs.
- Phase 2 / Scale – support scaling in the most complex waves; reduce footprint as internal teams build muscle.
For each phase, define:
- Tangible outcomes (e.g., “signed-off TOM blueprint and 18-month roadmap,” “two journeys redesigned and live in Region X with measurable improvements,” “shared service A live with X% of volume migrated”).
- Expected internal vs external contribution.
Avoid open-ended statements like “support TOM implementation over three years” without clear phasing and exit paths.
3. Insist on a joint team, not a parallel universe
Practical safeguards:
- Every workstream lead from the firm has an internal co-lead.
- Interview and approve key team members, especially for long-duration roles.
- Sit external teams with your people (physically or virtually), not in a separate space.
Set expectations:
- Consultants facilitate and synthesize; your leaders decide.
- All key interviews and workshops include internal leaders; no “black box” consulting.
- Internal staff should be doing at least half of the stakeholder engagement over time.
4. Manage scope, cost, and drift
Large programs can easily grow. To avoid that:
- Limit initial scope; add only when previous phases deliver value.
- Use rolling three–six-month plans, not a fully detailed multi-year plan that no one will follow.
- Track consultant days and value delivered side by side; if value is slipping, address it early.
If you sense the engagement becoming a “deck factory” or focused on low-value analysis, reset:
- Refocus on the next set of concrete decisions and changes.
- Reduce time spent on documents that no one will read after sign-off.
- Put more weight on implementation support for real changes over extended diagnostics.
18.4 Working with Independent Consultants from the Umbrex Community
Independent consultants can be a powerful complement—or alternative—to large firms, especially for TOM work that needs senior attention, flexibility, and targeted expertise rather than big teams.
The Umbrex community brings together independent consultants, many with top-tier firm backgrounds and deep industry or functional expertise, who can be deployed as individuals or small teams tailored to your needs.
Typical ways to use independent consultants in TOM work:
1. Senior TOM advisor / “coach” to the CEO/COO
A senior independent with substantial TOM and transformation experience can:
- Help you sharpen the TOM brief, design choices, and roadmap.
- Challenge both internal teams and other advisors (including large firms) constructively.
- Provide an external perspective in key decision meetings without bringing a large team.
This is especially useful when:
- You are already running a TOM internally and want periodic challenge and guidance, not a full-time consulting team.
- You are working with a large firm and want an independent counterweight focused only on your interests.
2. Fractional TOM architect or transformation director
You may not need (or be able to hire) a full-time permanent TOM architect or transformation director immediately. An Umbrex independent can fill that gap:
- Part-time or full-time for a defined period (e.g., 6–12 months).
- Setting up governance, workstreams, and the TOM design method.
- Recruiting and coaching internal successors to take over.
This model works well when:
- You want to avoid building a large central transformation bureaucracy.
- You need to get started fast while you search for a permanent hire.
3. Targeted expert “pods” for specific TOM components
Because independents can be assembled flexibly, you can bring in small, specialized teams for:
- Designing and standing up shared services or GBS.
- Redesigning 1–2 critical journeys with digital and data components.
- Structuring sourcing and location strategy (onshore/nearshore/offshore mix).
- Building risk and control frameworks that fit your TOM.
These pods typically:
- Work for 6–12 weeks on a focused scope.
- Co-design with your teams, then support initial implementation.
- Hand over templates, tools, and training so your internal people can replicate.
4. QA and “second opinion” on big-firm or internal work
Umbrex independents can also act as quality assurance or a “red team”:
- Reviewing TOM blueprints, roadmaps, and business cases for coherence and realism.
- Challenging assumptions on benefits, timelines, and dependencies.
- Helping ensure that what large firms propose is implementable with your people and constraints.
This can be a light-touch engagement (e.g., a few days per month over several months) but can significantly de-risk big decisions.
5. Bridging between waves and aftercare
After a big push (e.g., after a large firm’s main phase ends), you may need:
- Continued support for selected waves without bringing back a large team.
- Help institutionalizing routines (journey reviews, performance huddles, benefit tracking).
- Support for new BUs or regions that need to adopt the TOM later.
Independent consultants can provide this bridge:
- Lean, embedded with your teams.
- Focused on making the TOM stick, not on selling the next big project.
Choosing between large firms and independents (or combining them)
You don’t have to choose one or the other for everything. A pragmatic pattern many leadership teams use:
Use a large firm for:
- Very large-scale, time-critical transformations (e.g., global PMI, multi-country core platform replacement).
- Situations requiring hundreds of consultant-days per month and extensive analytics or PMO capacity.
Use independents (e.g., from the Umbrex community) for:
- Senior advisory, TOM architecture, and sounding-board roles.
- Targeted design and implementation support on specific journeys, functions, or capabilities.
- QA / second opinion and post-major-wave “aftercare”.
- Interim or fractional roles (TOM architect, transformation director, journey coach).
You can also combine them:
- Big firm leads the initial global design and early waves.
- Independents support you in challenging their work, localizing the TOM, and making it stick over time.
- Independents help avoid “consultant dependency” by building internal capability and gradually taking over from large teams as you transition to BAU.
A short checklist for working with independent consultants from the Umbrex community:
- Have we defined a tight scope and outcome for the role (advisor, architect, pod, QA, interim)?
- Is the independent clearly paired with an internal owner (not operating alone in a corner)?
- Do we have a timeline and exit / transition plan from day one?
- Are we using them to build our capability, not just as extra hands?
If you can answer “yes” to these questions, you are using external consultants—both large firms and independents—as leverage for your TOM, not as a substitute for leadership.
