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Quality and value
Should we set a time limit on consulting projects?
As I recently pointed out, the recession has apparently not cured clients – or consulting firms, for that matter – of their confusion between “staff substitution” or “contingent labour” and true consulting. As it says on the tin, staff substitution is the use of external people in roles usually filled by permanent employees. It’s a [...]
The true meaning of professionalism
Management consulting is sometimes – and I think erroneously – described as a profession. Most definitions of a profession are based on there being (a) a single and codified body of specialist knowledge in which a professional is trained and (b) a body which is responsible for ensuring that that knowledge, and whatever ethics accompany [...]
Measuring value: inputs versus outputs
Value has never been a more important – or contentious – issue in consulting. Much of the discussion around cutting back on the use of consultants during the recession, now being echoed in public sectors across the world, stems from the difficulty in measuring the contribution consultants make and consequent lack of evidence of value [...]
Judgement Day
What do a pen and a children’s playground have in common? A couple of weeks ago, I was in Copenhagen with a Danish consultancy, Valcon. It’s an unusual firm, employing mechanical engineers and product designers alongside more traditional management consultants. “A lot of consulting is about process,” said one of the directors, “checking off that [...]
Working in partnership: three words to avoid
What is it about the consulting industry? It picks up harmless, unassuming phrases and converts them into linguistic behemoths. “Working in partnership” is now so ubiquitous it’s become the equivalent of an “um” or “er” in a firm’s marketing material, filling the gap when it can’t think of anything else to say. Ten years ago [...]
Public sector consulting: the great detox
Our latest survey of quarterly buying trends gives an idea of just how fast public sector consulting is changing. It’s a point we’ll be exploring further in a report to be published later in the autumn, but we included a few extra questions in our standard quarterly survey, just to test the water, with interesting [...]
Yet another Enron?
I suppose it was only a matter of time. Writing our forthcoming report on consulting in the financial services sector, I’ve been struck by just how much went on hold during the recession. We all know that demand for consulting plummeted and that, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, almost the only things [...]
The things that go wrong
When we carry out the research for our briefing notes, we usually ask consulting firms what – in their opinion – the main causes of underperforming consulting projects are. Having written 18 briefing notes so far we’re starting to see a few issues cropping up consistently, so we thought we’d share them with you. You [...]
The consulting gamble
Speaking to a senior executive within the pharmaceutical industry about the value consultants deliver recently, I was struck by one particular comment: ‘Everyone knows that half of consulting works and that the other half doesn’t’, he said. ‘The trouble is, you never know which half you’re going to get.’ Bearing in mind how much his [...]
Accentuate the positive
I have written in this blog before about the extent to which the difference between clients and consultants has been eroded by increasing management education, by the availability of previously privileged information via the internet and by the number of former consultants now working in client organisations. I’ve also argued that client-consultant convergence matters because [...]
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