Turning Technical Expertise into Clear, Confident Proposals
Client
A New Zealand based engineering SME providing design, advisory, and project delivery services to councils, utilities, and private developers.
Challenge
The firm had a strong technical reputation, but its consulting work was underperforming. Common issues included:
- Highly technical proposals that clients found hard to understand
- Workshops that generated lots of ideas but little structure or follow through
- Scope creep driven by vague requirements and assumptions made early
- Senior engineers spending significant time rewriting documents and clarifying expectations
The leadership team knew they had the expertise. The problem was how that expertise was captured, structured, and communicated during consulting engagements.
They wanted a way to make their consulting work feel clearer, more consistent, and easier for clients to say “yes” to.
Approach
The firm partnered with Ministry of Insights to deploy Consult Lab, a structured, AI assisted environment for improving the way consulting conversations, requirements, and recommendations are captured and developed.
Working with practice leads and project managers, Ministry of Insights:
- Mapped the existing consulting journey from first conversation to signed proposal
- Standardised key discovery questions for different service lines
- Used AI to help structure workshop notes, meeting summaries, and raw client input into clear problem statements and options
- Developed reusable consulting templates for scoping, options analysis, and recommendations
- Tested different ways of framing value, risk, and trade offs using simulated client scenarios
Instead of starting from a blank page or a heavily edited old proposal, teams used Consult Lab to build each engagement from a consistent, well structured base.
Outcomes
Within a few months of using Consult Lab, the engineering SME was able to:
- Reduce proposal turnaround time without sacrificing quality
- Improve clarity of scope, assumptions, and exclusions in their consulting work
- See fewer revisions and clarification requests from clients
- Reduce scope creep by getting better alignment earlier in the process
- Free up senior engineers’ time by lifting the baseline quality of drafts produced by the wider team
Business development staff reported that client conversations became easier, because proposals reflected the client’s language and priorities more clearly.
Value Delivered
For the business
- Stronger conversion rates on consulting proposals
- More predictable project delivery and margins
- Less time firefighting unclear expectations in later stages of projects
For clients
- Clearer articulation of the problem, options, and trade offs
- Increased confidence that the engineering team understood their context
- Easier internal sign off, especially where non technical decision makers were involved
For teams
- A shared consulting “playbook” instead of everyone working their own way
- AI supported drafting that made it easier to get from rough notes to structured documents
- More time spent on high value thinking and design, not document formatting and rework
Why It Worked
Consult Lab worked for this engineering SME because:
- It did not try to “automate consulting”
- Human expertise stayed at the centre, with AI handling structure, clarity, and consistency
- The focus was on making thinking visible and communicable, not just faster document production
