Conflict Of Interest: Consulting Engineers Need To Be Vigilant

The importance of imposing internal controls and maintaining vigilance for potential conflicts for consulting engineers is discussed. Consulting engineers need to be vigilant for potential conflicts of interest. They should consider conducting an internal audit to examine what procedures the firm has in place to detect and recognize conflict situations before a new contract is signed.
Contracts should be reviewed and carefully drafted to establish what information relating to a client or the subject of the contract is to be considered confidential. It is suggested that the consulting engineers should not only take care to consider the possible conflicts that are with the firm, but also those that may exist with the employees and the principals.

How to Choose a Consulting Forester

It discusses how to select a consulting forester. A consulting forester is a full-time, independent forester whose services are available to the public and who does not work for the timber buying business. The ideal consultant should be in business long enough to have a proven track record. He must have a good professional background, keeping himself up-to-date through continuing education courses, conferences and professional journals.

Practical Knowledge Management Tool Use in a Software Consulting Company

It presents the results of a study on the different types of actual usage of technical skills management tools at Computas, a medium-size software consulting company that develops knowledge-based software. The company has no traditional departments, but is organized in projects and a set of processes, where knowledge management is considered to be one important process. The study found that employees used the skills management tool for resource allocation and short-term problem solving.

The study found that the tool use in problem solving also has a long-term effect in letting employees know who to ask next time. The skills management tool is also used for identifying new project opportunities and to support skills upgrading. The tool supports learning practices and motivates use at both an individual and company level. Overall, it was found that the usage of the tool is very much implanted in the daily work of the organization, and supports a multitude of functions.
It explores the possibility that utilizing the firm's knowledge resources to complete important tasks can backfire and undermine competitive performance. Drawing on organizational capabilities and knowledge-sharing research, we develop a situated performance view that holds that the value of obtaining and using knowledge within a firm depends on the task situation. Using a data set of 182 sales proposals for client work in a management consulting company, we show that sales teams that had varying needs to learn and differentiate themselves from competitors derived different levels of value from obtaining and using electronic documents and advice from colleagues.

Highly experienced teams were more likely than inexperienced teams to lose the sales bids if they utilized such knowledge. Teams that had a high need to differentiate themselves from competitors also had a lower chance of winning if they utilized electronic documents. There were situations, however, where teams performed better if they utilized the firm's knowledge resources. These results suggest that competitive performance depends not on how much firms know but on how they use what they know.

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