A restaurant in a hotel – objects and non-objects of consulting

please, see the beginning in “Restaurant Consulting of HoReCa projects - Pros and Cons”

You won’t believe this, but we are always sincerely happy about this “scandalous turn in a project we work on, because all of this is a sure sign that the project reached its implementation phase and it is high time to transfer the increasing “shit-exchanging” processes between the project team and the cross-functional operational units of the Customer into constructive working relationship.

Independently from further post-project realities and plans, we have an obligation by the Project completion date when our involvement is over to leave the Customer with the team that can adequately manage the operations management at the post-project stage. In case it is one of the Project’s conditions that we are responsible for the Content Management and System Integration, then the team training is simply an integral part of the Project design.

Without getting into boring details, we can acknowledge that practically in all cases we were successful in converting the personnel from “radical opponents” camp into friends and adequate participants of the Project.
The whole process of project consulting at the stage of project implementation boils down to quite lengthy practice training and attitude changing workshops the content of which, by hook or by crook, we are trying to implant into the heads of innocent people who by a twist of unkind fate ended up in the same project space with us.

Though, we are not quite sincere here – we do not feel sorry for them to any degree.

As we wrote above, the situation when the project team is functionally and administratively isolated from the Customer’s ongoing operational hardships and transactions is so not typical for our altitudes, but absolutely imperative for the project start-up – this is one of the absolutely necessary starting points of successful project implementation. It is not that it’s difficult to ensure this segregation from a technical point of view – to keep the project team isolated does not present any significant difficulties. The problem is in the troublesome tradition to try to assertively immerse the project team into the everyday routine of the Company’s operations analysis in general, and, by doing this, to spread the goals and objectives of the Project all over the individual structural units of the Company, bringing everything to… well, you know to what.

One Stratford lad, a well-known corporate law specialist, called this phenomenon the “white cow syndrome”. In other words, this is not an economic, but a mythological bovine (i.e. a category), a constant appeals to which ensure an alibi and financial support inside the company to a host of fortune tellers who make predictions using the Company life’s by-products in order to forecast the general direction of its motion.

Sometimes, in exceptional cases, some independent “theoretician-shepherds” are brought in; they, like shamans, endeavour to label different parts and limbs of the beast, groomed to a varied degree, with some specialized and difficult to read inscriptions. In rare minutes of rest they introduce the local inhabitants to the most recent achievements in corporate “care of souls”, enjoy collective bag races in order to form the “team spirit” and build models of bridges and houses with plastic blocks - together with the dismal Customer’s team. They call this a frontier of the consulting though in project management.

The reality is, however, that, - thank to all of this public rebuked by us, -the project goals, the project’s economic feasibility and even simple common sense are expected to assume traditional postures and look at the same traditional angle (upwards) with uneasy reverence in order to observe the catwalk of the White Cow of the “secret” corporate implications and - this is the key thing here - listen attentively to the shepherd’s revelations about the possible reasons behind the torpidity of the bovine’s progressive motion.

Of course, even at a quick glance it becomes clear that all the “sacred” acts and rituals have very realistic and more than traditional reasons behind, as the poor animal is just about to collapse under the load of both internal and external escort who at the same time readily exchange dense fire with each other fighting for the right to attach their proboscis to the most nutritious elements and processes.

To consult this public on the matters of restaurant and services business, catering service management and investment planning? Please, have mercy on us!

As a matter of principle we try not to get involved into the restaurant consulting of HoReCa venues, if we are not provided with a chance to perform as the project management team, and particularly in cases when it is not planned to have a project management team at all, and the main goal is to help the acting management to “learn their lesson” so that they could perform independently further on.

We think this makes absolutely no sense for the Customer and consider this as lost time for ourselves. Usually we explain plainly to the owner or an investor that all of the enumerated staffage, shamanic rituals and conditioning manipulations in order to find the godforsaken team spirit – this is all possible in presence of real, living (or fail-proof) business process; this is exactly what we are doing – start-up and launching of stable business processes in hotel and restaurant business; we also say that those who want to learn are most welcome in the project and will be able to learn a lot of interesting things, as for the group of “secret teachers” and the escort – they should undergo a light form of “hunger therapy” and give us an opportunity to do our job.

As soon as the living and capable restaurant “organism” becomes the reality, we pass it over to the Customer’s operating team so that they could fully implement their traditional managerial skills. Well, we can guarantee them two or three years. But what if a miracle will happen and people trained by us will continue to run this business…, but are we children to indulge ourselves to such immature and harmful fantasies?

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