Great consulting firms are not great because they have teams of brilliant people, each of whom are independently capable of solving any problem that will ever arise during a client engagement. Great consulting firms are great because they have an established process for compensating when their teams lack all the skills they need.
I am currently lucky enough to work for a firm that has virtually perfected this process. (It’s nice to work with people who make you look good.)

The process has three phases.

First, before the engagement begins, the partner responsible for the engagement works to make sure that the manager or senior manager running the engagement is fully aware of the client’s requirements, the engagement’s goals and, perhaps most importantly, the firm’s work quality expectations.

Second, the reporting and monitoring goal is to identify where the team will need help. Usually, most of this is determined ahead of time.

Third, when support is required, the partner works with partners in other areas of the firm to bring in expert resources. During this phase, partners are able to gather the complete know how of the organization in a just-in-time fashion and focus it on solving a problem. A Financial Services Advisory team might need to pull in experts from Tax, Audit, Systems Risk Management, and other specialist teams within Financial Services Advisory.

The very structure of the partnership motivates other areas of the firm to help. Partners do not benefit solely from the engagements they are personally involved in selling and delivering. In other words, their personal compensation is based upon the success of the firm as a whole.

The exact approach is rebuilt every single time because each client engagement is unique, and each team has a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses. Who parachutes in to help a team solve a client problem when they do not have all the necessary expertise and how unique client problems are solved are reinvented with each engagement. There is constant innovation around “who” and the “how”. But, the process for making sure that the overall project succeeds and the incentive structure within the firm do not change.