Every consulting engagement leaves something behind. Sometimes it’s a 200-page playbook with charts, frameworks, and process maps. Sometimes it’s a senior planner who knows exactly why the criticality model is set up the way it is, can train new hires on it, and would push back if leadership tried to change it. Come back twelve months later and you can tell which one was the real deliverable.
The playbook goes on a shelf. The internal champion outlasts the consultants, the leadership change, the budget reshuffle, and the next reorg. That is the difference between having asset-management capability and having asset-management documentation. In my experience it’s also the line between programs that thrive and programs that die.
What kills implementation continuity
I’ve seen more stalled and failed asset-management programs than I can count. Almost every one of them traces back to one of three problems:
The consultants left before knowledge transferred
The engagement ended on time. The deliverables were accepted. Then the people who understood the design walked out the door with the engagement. Six months later, when someone needs to adjust a criticality threshold, there’s nobody internal who can explain why the threshold was set where it was.
The original sponsor moved on
A VP championed the program, the rollout went well, and then the VP got promoted, retired, or moved to a different organization. The replacement had no stake in the design. Within a year the program drifted back to whatever the new leader was comfortable with.
The frontline never owned it
Planners and supervisors were “trained on” the new workflow but never participated in designing it. They put up with it while it was new and somebody was watching, then went back to whatever worked before. Adoption died quietly and nobody announced it.
What an internal champion looks like
Your internal champion is usually one or two layers below the executive sponsor who signed the engagement: a planning supervisor, a reliability lead, a facilities manager who’s been at the organization for ten years and intends to be there for another ten.
They have three qualities in common:
- They understand why decisions were made, not just what was decided. They can explain the criticality model, the asset hierarchy, the workflow design, and they can defend it when someone proposes changing it for the wrong reason.
- They have the credibility to push back upward. When a new VP suggests reorganizing the program, the champion is the person who can say “here’s why we did it this way, and here’s what we’ll lose if we change it.”
- They train the next generation. New hires learn the program from them instead of from a binder. The institutional knowledge transfers without consultants involved.
How to build one (vs. hire one)
You can’t hire an internal champion from outside. By definition, they have to be internal. What you can do is set up your consulting engagement so somebody on your team walks out of it as one.
That changes how the work gets done in three ways:
Co-design instead of present-and-approve
If the consultants design the program and present it for sign-off, you’ll get sign-off. You won’t get ownership. If your senior planner sits in every design session and is partly responsible for the choices made, they’ll own the result. The work takes a little longer, and the result lasts a lot longer.
Hand off the reasoning along with the decisions
Documentation that lists what was decided is the playbook. Documentation that captures why each decision was made is the foundation for someone else to defend it later. Insist on the second kind. It takes more pages and more conversations. Do it anyway.
Build in a six-month check-back instead of a final deliverable
There’s no such thing as a “final deliverable” in asset management. The real test comes six to twelve months later, when the rollout has met reality. A short check-in built into the engagement gives the internal champion a chance to ask the questions that only show up after they’ve lived with the design.
The consultant tax you stop paying
The math on a well-developed internal champion is straightforward: every adjustment your team can make without calling the consultant back is a tax you stop paying. Over a few years, that adds up to real money.
The firms that don’t want this for you will tell you that asset management is complex, that the frameworks evolve, that you’ll always need external expertise. Some of that’s true. But the difference between “we’ll consult occasionally” and “we’re on retainer indefinitely” comes down to whether your team can run the program without us. If a firm’s business model depends on the second arrangement, you better think hard before you sign with them.
How to identify the internal champion in your own organization this quarter
Ask yourself three questions, in roughly this order:
- Who’s been here long enough to remember the last attempt? Continuity beats novelty in asset management. Your potential champion has probably seen at least one previous initiative come and go.
- Who do other people go to when they have a process question? The informal source-of-truth on your team is your champion in waiting. They’ve already earned the credibility; the work is to give them the structure.
- Who pushes back constructively in design meetings? The person who challenges assumptions early is going to be the person who defends the design later. A skeptic is useful. The one to worry about is the person who has stopped talking.
If you can name that person now, build your next engagement around making sure they finish it stronger than they started. That person is the deliverable! If your consultants left tomorrow, who on your team could explain why the criticality model is set up the way it is? And if the answer is nobody, what did you pay for?
