If there’s one thing that we learned during our time at 18F, it’s that delivering short bursts of consulting work, focused on a specific topic, can empower government managers and teams with the critical know-how they need to produce great technology outcomes. In other words, not everything requires a full-fledged consulting engagement.
Now with Skylight, we’re excited to take what we’ve learned from executing these types of focused, quick-turnaround, high-impact consulting engagements to the next level. We call it Microconsulting Services.
What is microconsulting?
Microconsulting is a special type of consulting format that features an individual or small team who produces an immediate deliverable on a specific topic for a low cost. Think of it as a quick and easy means of supplementing your team with supercharged brains.
| Traditional Consulting | Microconsulting |
|---|---|
| Large teams | Individual or small team |
| Long timeframe | Immediate timeframe |
| Large scope | Narrow scope |
| High budget impact | Low budget impact |
Why should you consider microconsulting?
Government managers and teams are modern knowledge workers (educated, experienced, adaptable) who are quite capable of performing their jobs superbly. Sometimes, however, they lack specific skills/knowledge in 1–2 areas for a given task or project. It might not be possible or practical to fill those gaps through extensive training. In addition, access to internal resources with such know-how might not be available, and engaging an outside firm in a full-blown consulting engagement would simply be overkill.
This is the type of problem that microconsulting is designed to solve, providing experts who can supplement, even level up, your team’s existing skills and knowledge base with a short burst of intellectual horsepower. Whether it’s rapidly prototyping an idea to facilitate strategic decision-making, conducting a workshop to teach a new technical skill, pinpointing code-quality issues behind a slow-moving software development project, evaluating the suitability of an open-source-software alternative, or providing feedback on how well a solicitation aligns with agile delivery practices, there are tons of useful applications for microconsulting.
It’s also a great, low-risk way to test out the capabilities of a firm before engaging in a larger body of work (that is, “try before buying”).
What types of microconsulting do we offer?
We possess digital expertise in a number of different areas — for example, design/product workshops, agile acquisition, agile delivery, open-source software, rapid prototyping, software engineering, legacy modernization, microservices architecture, application programming interfaces, and cloud computing. That means we can provide a wide range of Microconsulting Services tailored to your specific needs. We also offer several standard ones as well.
What prices do we charge?
All of our Microconsulting Services are conveniently priced within the federal government’s micropurchase thresholds (civilian: $10,000, defense: $5,000), making us just a swipe of the credit card away.
If you’d like to learn more about our Microconsulting Services, please drop us an email at [email protected].