Using management consultants

Organizations are using management consultants at a greater rate than ever before. For the larger established consultancies, at least, the late 1990s represented a period of almost continuous boom. Admittedly, work that was directly related to Y2K problems tended to fall away in the latter half of 1999, but all the indications are that the consultancy train has started to pick up speed again.

The vast majority of consultancy assignments have always concentrated on trying to improve a client’s performance in a function or group of functions. However, there has been a fundamental change over the years in the way that consultants carry out their work.

Prior to the late 1970s most consultants carried out what is often now referred to as theoretical consulting. Depending to a large extent on the function under investigation, the consultant would concentrate on understanding what was required of the service and then produce a report outlining new and hopefully better ways of doing the work. With theoretical consulting the emphasis was on the report and the client was left alone to carry out the practical effort necessary to bring about the change. The consultant was therefore rarely in a position where blame or criticism was likely to stick.

These days most consultancy assignments are of a practical nature. The consultant is engaged to provide specialist advice and then work with the client’s staff to make the necessary changes.

The gradual movement in emphasis from theoretical to practical consultancy was triggered by technology developments. Practical consultancy would have been possible without these developments but, in the event, technology provided the spur. The extent of the change towards practical consulting can be judged from the fact that many of the large consultancies derived from an auditing base now describe themselves in terms that emphasize the practical systems development nature of their services.

Consultants are bound to be better advisers if they have past experience of implementing change and, in practical consulting, they are forced to accept responsibility for their ideas. This means there can be few clients who would prefer to employ consultants on a theoretical basis.

Nevertheless, there was one advantage in theoretical consultancy that to a large degree has been lost. A consultant asked to study a business or a function of a business prior to the mid 1970s, did so without the pressure of ready-made software solutions piling up daily in front of the team members. Often the theoretical consultant was the only person ever to have both the time and inclination to look for an ideal solution since the organization was founded. Frequently, the consultant had no idea what the solution was until the ’main findings’ were finally submitted to paper after which the answer often became beautifully obvious. The key point here is that the old style consultant could not trust the client’s staff to give an accurate analysis of what was required from any given process and was therefore forced to get the answer from ’the customer’. Now many assignments start with client and consultant studying the range of ready-made package solutions and consequently many projects end up concentrating on improving the current service and neglecting to ask if it is the right service. Such shortcuts are difficult to justify at a time when so much emphasis is being placed on understanding customer needs.

Clearly, BPR and techniques like strategy consulting ought to provide the opportunity to discover what is required of the function. Management consultants might justifiably claim that they would always try to establish the customer needs for the foreseeable future if they are given the time and the opportunity. On too many occasions, however, the consultants start an assignment by accepting the client’s short-list of alternative options.

No one can doubt that the standard of management consultancy has improved continuously over the years, but the number of really satisfied clients does not appear to have increased at the same rate. Is it possible, that at a time when continuous improvement is essential, management consultants fail their clients because they are not active on the client’s behalf on a continuous basis? Despite the practical help they provide, could it sometimes be dangerous to use such specialists on an irregular basis when the competitive marketplace is changing so quickly?