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• Supporting Infrastructure, Systems & Tools: internal consulting groups may manage their own infrastructure, systems and tools or may depend on others to provide them (e.g., IT). Even fairly self-contained internal consulting groups will depend on some level of infrastructure support.

• Internal Functional Support Groups: internal functional support groups are important as potential clients and as partners to make sure that internal consultancies operate in a manner that allows them to attract, develop and retain talent, as well as provide efficient services to the organization.

• External Partners & Providers: internal consulting groups, under the right circumstances, can and should leverage external partners and providers to contribute infrequently needed specialty skills and augment team capacity, or to make assets and tools available that can not be cost-effectively developed in-house.

Internal functional and external partners can provide tools, services or alliances to internal consultancies that enable more efficient and more effective service delivery to organizational clients.

Groups' relationships with external vendors range from developing partnerships that serve the business client to directly competing with them for business. One group in our study manages the external vendors' contact and interaction with the client by essentially "subsuming" them into their own group for the duration of their engagement. In this way, the internal consulting group operates as the "prime contractor" to the client while the third party service providers operate under the internal consulting group's brand, identity, and methodology. It should be noted that this relationship is supported by a formal engagement methodology.

For groups that strive to meet a variety of client needs, strategic relationships with third party vendors and consultants may offer depth and flexibility of resources. The return on an investment in creating a formal group engagement methodology should factor in the gains possible with respect to managing external consultants more effectively, and the potential value of the internal group maintaining a strong independent relationship with their business client.

Internal service groups should also compare the administrative costs of managing external consultants to the gains of their own better client positioning, and an improved ability to oversee the service quality level of external consultants. A substantial opportunity exists in using internal consulting groups to qualify and select consulting services providers. These groups evidently have rich content knowledge and superior judgment in selecting professional services suppliers for their firms, and have the opportunity to add considerable value when compared with a standard procurement process. This is particularly true if a company is seeking to pre-qualify a shortlist of candidates and service providers, and when discussions are occurring outside the context of a specific project.

• Partner Provider Relationships

• Vendor Rating Tool

• IC Group PMO