How do you ensure that you constantly improve speed, quality, value and price/performance in your consulting services?
In short: How do you deliver more, at a lower price with a higher profit?
I find most of the management consulting industry terribly old fashioned. I have the impression that most management consultants are dinosaurs with very little feel for internal innovation. The adoption of new technology and thinking in the management consulting industry is slow.
It is the good old “Partner, sr. consultant, consultant, jr. consultant, trainee” hierarchy where we grow volume and margin through leveraging. Too many old style offices, too many meetings, too many face2face interviews, too many surveys, too many Word documents, too many PowerPoints, too many workshops, too much marketing fluff, too much “old-boys-network”.
I believe we as an industry have an obligation to be more innovative. We must embrace new technology in our working methods. Not only to become more productive, but also to “invent” new ways of serving our clients.
With the ever increasing pace of changes in the global markets, we – the management consulting industry – must reinvent ourselves and use new technology to deliver more, faster, at a more competitive price and with a higher profit for ourselves.
Do you have any thoughts on this challenge?
I agree with your thoughts – there is little innovation among the larger consultancies and most of the newer technologies are unused except for perhaps in marketing – seldom if ever in delivery. It is, in part, that there is a lot of inertia in the system and partners earning substantial money find it hard to challenge a system that continues to deliver earnings and prestige. However, ultimately the client is suffering (although probably unknowlingly) in that there are definitely new and better ways of doing things more cost effectively AND producing higher value. It is only a matter of time before the old business model is superceded by something better and more modern and that starts to become obvious to clients too. If the Big 4 and major strategy houses do not do it to themselves, someone will do it to them.
@Simon: Maybe it is upon us to make the change. I believe any professional business must challenge themselves from time to time with the following questions: “How do I deliver more value, faster and with at a more attractive price/performance ratio to my customers and with a higher profit to myself?” Those four questions drive global growth and wealth.
I also believe that with the proliferation of web based collaboration platforms and using the Big Data phenomenon it will be possible to provide a number of management consulting services in a new form and shape. We do some of this in TBK Consult (my consulting company). We are a bunch of senior guys working together to help software companies with rapid international market penetration. We can take on quite big projects since we are 40 people working on the same consulting platform. Our internal business processes are outsourced to clever people in Portugal, Estonia, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and New Zealand. We have absolute zero overhead cost and focusing on one consulting discipline only makes us very competitive. We still have issues to solve, but I sense we are onto something big.