Fluent Essays

After reading chapter-13 from the attached text book and the provided links, choose the five tips that you found the most interesting and applicable to you. Follow the rank order of tips 1(high important) and 5(least important).  https://managementconsulted.com/tips-for-new-management-consultants/ https://www.consultingsuccess.com/21-productivity-tips-for-consultants https://www.forbes.com/sites/dailymuse/2013/11/05/be-the-best-consultant-ever-6-things-that-will-make-you-great/?sh=56dcf63d95d6 For each of the five you chose, answer the below questions    Why did you choose this tip and rank it the way you did? If you were working as a consultant how would you implement each of these five tips to improve your work? At the end of the chapter, the Author asks you to share any other tips you come up with. List one tip that is not one of the 22 listed or included by your classmates posts and explain why you think it is important. Answer should be in own words and based on the understanding from the readings. strictly no plagiarism. RICHARD NEWTON THE MASTER. THE ART OF CONSULTANCY FT Prentice Hall FINANCIAL TIMES THE MANAGEMENT CONSULTA T MASTERING THE ART OF CONSULTANCY Learn the answers to the critical questions you need to ask to be a top management consultant such as: • How should you identify and define the services you will offer? • Why do clients buy consultancy and what are they looking for? • How can you bring maximum value to the clients organisation? • How do you engage clients and win work? • How can you deliver results that will be sustainable for your client? • How do you establish long-term relationships that bring you repeat business with clients? • When should you say no to a consulting engagement? • How do you navigate your way through the potential ethical dilemmas that face consultants? Discover the ·client-centric approach to successful consulting ET Prentice Hall IiIi Prentice Hall .. FINANCIAL TIMES In an increasingly competitive world, we believe its quality of thinking that gives you the edge - an idea that opens new doors, a technique that solves a problem, or an insight that simply makes sense of it all. The more you know, the smarter and faster you can go. Thats why we work with the best minds in business and finance to bring cutting-edge thinking and best learning practice to a global market. Under a range of leading imprints, including Financial Times Prentice Hall,we create world-class print publications and electronic products bringing our readers knowledge, skills and understanding, which can be applied whether studying or at work. To find out more about Pearson Education publications, or tell us about the books youd like to find, you can visit us at www.pearsoned.co.uk The Management Consultant Mastering the art of consultancy Richard Newton Financial Times Prentice Hall is an imprint of Harlow, England. London . New York. Boston . San Francisco . Toronto · Sydney . Singapore . Hong Kong Tokyo . Seoul . Taipei . New Delhi . Cape Town. Madrid. Mexico City . Amsterdam . Munich . Paris · M ilan PEARSON EDUCATION LIMITED Edinburgh Gate Harlow CM20 2]E Tel : +44 (0)1279 623623 Fax : +44 (0)1279 4310S9 Website: www.pearsoned .co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2010 © Richard Newton 2010 The right of Richard Newton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN: 978-0-273-73087-3 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newton, Richard, 1964- The management consultant : mastering the art of consultancy / Richard Newton. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-273-73087-3 (pbk.) 1. Business consultants. I. Title. HD69.C6N495 2010 001--dc22 2009050850 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the Publishers . 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 Typeset in 9/13pt Stone Serif by 30 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport Th e PublisherS policy is to LIse paper manufactured from sus tainable forests. Contents Acknowledgements / vii Preface / ix Introduction / xi lImB Understanding consultants and consultancy Consultants and consultancy / 3 2 Why does anyone buy consultancy? / 23 3 Your consulting service / 41 4 The three core processes of client-centric consulting / 58 IImII Consulting engagements 5 Finding and winning work / 77 6 Delivering consulting engagements and satisfying clients / 108 7 The alternative approach - process consulting and facilitation / 132 8 Closing engagements and sustaining results / 147 High-performance consulting 9 Developing long-term client relationships / 169 10 The ethical dimension / 181 11 The language of consulting / 199 12 Knowing when to say no / 220 13 Key consulting tips / 234 14 The clients perspective - buying consultancy / 251 Conclusion / 269 Contents --------------------------------------------~ .aliII Additional resources for consultants A The tools, processes and materials of a consultancy business / 275 B References / 279 C Sample proposal letter / 281 Index / 285 Acknowledgements I would like to thank five consulting colleagues who I started working with years ago in Coopers & Lybrand. Although our careers have moved on in different ways, we still work together from time to time. More often we meet up, share stories and enjoy laughing about the occasion- ally pretentious side of the profession. They are: Graham Jump, Peter Meredith, Perry Childs, Richard Ellis and Andy Macey. Dedication This book is dedicated to my son Konrad for inspiring me to write the book, when he admitted that he really did not have the faintest idea what I did. Preface This book is a personal guide to the art of management consulting. It sets out to help new and experienced consultants to do one thing: to become better consultants. In simple terms, better means providing help that is of the most long-term value to your clients. The approach is also simple: to identify what it is that the best consultants do that their less effective col- leagues do not - and how you can do it, too. Underlying this is my belief in client-centric consulting. The contents are derived from three sources. The first source is my expe- rience as a consultant (working for Coopers & Lybrand, A.T Kearney, Ernst & Young and my own company Enixus). Secondly, my experiences in industry as a client - negotiating, buying and managing consultants. Finally and most importantly, I have a network of trusted consulting col- leagues whose ideas have flavoured the book. Like a magpie I have picked up ideas and concepts throughout my career. I have shifted through them, throwing away most, keeping hold of the ones I like and think are precious. Many ideas in this book are my own, but of course I have learnt from others. I cant remember the sources of all of these, so I am sure more credit is deserved than I have given. There were several reasons for writing this book, but two of them stand out. Firstly, there are comparatively few books on consulting, unlike many other management disciplines. Look at the business book selection in a good bookshop or online, and you will find many on strategy, lead- ership, marketing, delivering change and project management, to name a few areas. But consulting books are relatively scarce, scarcer than an industry of its size justifies. There are a few good books on consulting, but they do not approach the audience in the way I want to. Preface --..-- The second reason comes down to my frequent frustration when I work with or engage other consultants. The simple truth is that the profession often does not live up to its own hype. This is not to deny that there are many brilliant consultants out there, and I have been lucky enough to work with and learn from a few of them. But there are many consultants who know they should be better to justify their fees. Worse, there are some very mediocre consultants who mistake being paid a lot with being good. As supposed experts in business, it is amazing how often consult- ants provide inadequate value to their clients. Management consulting is a large and very varied industry. The range of skills and services that fall under this title are huge. The difference in the type of work of the most expensive strategy houses compared to a project management consultant is so great that they may not even recognise each other as being in the same profession. There are some books that set out to address components of this industry. They tend to describe various tools and techniques of consulting. The best tools and techniques are only applicable in some situations and even if you know them it does not make you necessarily an effective consultant. I wanted to write a book for all management consultants. The book contains tools and techniques, but it is also intended to make you think like a consultant: how do effective consultants think about their work and their clients? Consulting experiences are varied, and each is unique. By thinking like a consultant, irrespective of the situation you are in, you will be able to deal with any situation in the most effective way. Introduction Ask someone in business to define the title management consultant, and you will get a wide variety of responses, not all of them complimen- tary! The title covers an extensive range of roles providing a variety of services. There are no universally recognised standards for being a man- agement consultant and as a result there are very varying levels of quality. In addition, many people want to be management consultants but do not know what it entails. There are many consulting success stories, and numerous people have become comfortably well off as consultants. Given this success, it might be thought that the world was full of praise for management consultants. Yet, if you ask many customers in the private and public sector about their feelings and experiences of consultants, you will often be met with sceptical and even highly negative comments. There are numerous causes for these responses, but they can be summarised into three major cate- gories. Firstly, too many consultants simply do not provide sufficient value to their customers and rely on churning out the same old work time and time again. Secondly, even good consultants with valuable knowledge often fail to understand true client needs. Thirdly, it is unfor- tunate to say, but there seems to be a number of very poor management consultants. This problem is compounded by the already mentioned lack of widely recognised standards for consultancy which can be used to judge or benchmark consultants against. A key reason for the negative perception of consulting is the fact that too many consultants are focused on what they have to offer and how they make money, rather than what clients need. Too many consultants pro- vide context-free and generiC advice, whereas what clients need is advice that is tailored to their specific culture and context. Overall, too many consultants spend too much time trying to be clever, rather than asking themselves what actually makes a good consultant? __ .... I;,;.;ntroduction This book will describe those factors that make good consultants and how consultants can go about providing client-centric consulting. It describes consulting from the viewpoint of the client, and so will help consultants understand what will make them successful. The book will , the book focuses on the skills of success- ful consultants , , help in deciding on how to provide the most appropriate services and advice to clients. Rather than considering the tools and processes of con- sulting, as most other consulting books do, it focuses on the skills of successful consultants - what they do that makes them successful, success in this context being defined as client results, not only in terms of financial returns for the consultant. Finally, the book contains many tips from the authors and his colleagues years of experience in consulting. There is a huge number of management consultants and business advi- sors of one form or another. Management consultancies have been one of the great business success stories of the past 40 years, with some now employing tens of thousands of people in worldwide bUSinesses, deliver- ing significant profits to shareholders and partners. At the other end of the scale there are thousands of small consultancies and independent consultants. As employment patterns change, more and more people are choosing to work as consultants. There are many attractions to a career in consulting. For some, consulting may seem the only choice following redundancy from a senior pOSition. There are many examples of initially despondent redundant managers finding not only a better income, but more enjoyable work in consultancy. For others, it is a lifetime career choice that starts from university, even though few students have any real concept of what being a consultant entails. Many people enter the consulting profession for a more flexible lifestyle, although this is harder to achieve in practice than it might seem. Whatever the reasons for considering it, consultancy is a great opportu- nity. Companies appear to have an increasing and insatiable demand for advisors and interim managers. Providing services can be very profitable and give consultants a high standard of living. But consulting also has risks. Its an increasingly competitive environment as more people are drawn to the profession. Select the wrong services or sales approach, and consulting will be a stressful profession. There is also the constant uncer- tainty about what happens when the current engagement is complete. Many people assume that simply because they have some speCialist expertise, they can be a good consultant . Certainly, expertise is an essential foundation. This book assumes you have an area of specialist knowledge and can competently apply the techniques and tools of your specialisation. But specialist knowledge is not enough. It is not intended as a tautology when I say that the core competency of a successful con- sultant is the skill of being a consultant. It is not a profession for everyone _ there is a specific art to being a consultant. Although the consulting industry is successful, that success is in jeop- ardy. Fee rates for many organisations, including some of the largest firms, are lower in real terms than they were previously. Clients are becoming more adept at controlling consultants and extracting the best value from them . More and more people are entering the consulting industry, meaning that to excel the standards are rising all the time. Consultants need to raise their game. This book sets out to provide you with guidance to what makes a great consultant, irrespective of where you fit amongst the incredible variety of management consultants. It avoids the constraints of focusing on specific elements of consulting or approaches to consultancy, and instead takes a client-centric view of what is needed to provide expert consulting. Although this book contains approaches, the fundamental questions it seeks to answer are what makes a great consultant and building on that, how do you achieve this? Contents and structure There are 14 chapters and two short additional reference lists in the book. The book is broken into three main parts. In the first part (Chapters 1-4), I explore what it means to be a management consultant and how to go about setting yourself up as one. In the second part (Chapters 5-8), I discuss how to go about winning work and delivering value to clients. In the third part (Chapters 9-14), I discuss a range of broader issues which set the context for consulting and will give you some additional tips and techniques to being a successful consultant. The book has been designed to be read from cover to cover, but you can dip into it as you require. If you want to reference parts individually, the detailed contents of each chapter are described in the following table: Introduction Chapter title Consultants and consultancy 2 Why does anyone buy consultancy? 3 Your consulting service 4 The three core processes of client-centric consulting 5 Finding and winning work 6 7 8 9 Delivering consulting engagements and satisfying clients The alternative approach - process consulting and facilitation Closing engagements and sustaining results Developing long-term client relationships 10 The ethical dimension Chapter summary Introduces the key terminology and concepts used in the book and provides an overview of what being a consultant means. Explores how successful consulting starts by understanding the reasons clients have for buying consultancy. This is essential knowledge for anyone wanting to provide client-centric consulting. Looks at the range of services you can offer as a consultant and how to position your skills and experience as a saleable client service. Discusses the core engagement process and then puts it in context with the clients change process, and the clients operational process. Understanding this relationship is at the heart of client-centric consulting. As a commercial business, consultants must find opportunities and sell their services to clients. This chapter discusses the processes and approach to winning work. Investigates the central work of a consultant- delivering consulting engagements which add value to the clients. Describes an alternative approach to expert consulting - process consulting - which can be used to deliver entire consulting engagements or as a tool on an engagement. All consulting should result in some change in a client, otherwise it delivers no value. Often the change takes place and must continue after the consultant has finished their work. This chapter considers how to achieve change, and how to sustain it after a consulting engagement is complete. Describes the advantages of having long-term client relationships and how to develop them. Considers the ethics of consulting, and the potential ethical dilemmas that regularly face consultants and ways to deal with them . Chapter title 11 The language of consulting 12 Knowing when to say no 13 Key consulting tips 14 The clients perspective- buying consultancy Conclusion A The tools and processes of a consultancy business B References C Sample proposal letter Introduction Chapter summary The central tool ofthe consultant is language. This chapter describes some approaches to communications and explores the topic of consulting jargon. Not all consulting opportunities are worth pursuing. This chapter describes the characteristics of engagements which consultants should avoid if possible. A summary of useful key tips from experience. A short review from a clients perspective of issues to consider when purchasing consultancy. A brief summary of the role of the management consultant and topics covered in this book. A summary of the key processes and tools any consulting business requires. A short list of references that have influenced the authors thinking, and may be useful to readers. A sample proposal letter for readers to adapt. Un de rsta n din 9 consultants and consultancy chapter Consultants and consultancy This chapter answers the questions: what is a management consult-ant and what is management consultancy? You may be an experienced consultant who wants to pick up a few new tricks. On the other hand, maybe you are new to consulting and want to gain a better understanding of what it is all about. This chapter is aimed primarily at the novice consultant, whether you are considering joining a major consultancy, are starting out as an independent consultant, or have been recruited as an internal consultant. It provides an overview of some of the fundamental concepts in consulting. Most of the book is about how to be a consultant. As an opening to the subject this chapter answers what being a consultant means. To gain the most from this book it is important to understand what a management consultant is, to be familiar with some common consulting terminology, and to appreciate the difference between being a consultant and other roles. If you want to be a management consultant, it is helpful to recognise why you want to be a consultant and to think through whether or not it is a profession that can meet your desires. To achieve this it is useful to have at least a basic grasp of the economics of a con- sulting business. This chapter sets out to do all of this. There is nothing complex here, but it is impor~ant as it provides the foundations for the rest of the book. This chapter covers a disparate range of topicS that com- bined give a basic, but essential, picture of consulting. __ :..U;;.;.nderstanding consultants and consultancy One small, but noteworthy point: rather than write the phrases manage- ment consultant and management consultancy repeatedly, I shorten these to consultant and consultancy. There are other types of consult- ants and consultancy, and many of them could find something useful in this book, but the focus is on the management variety. What is a management consultant? There is a large and growing band of people who call themselves manage- ment consultants. Some people are management consultants but do not use this title, preferring labels such as business advisor, strategy consultant, operational consultant or even leadership consultant. These and related job titles encompass a divergent and eclectic group of individuals. The work such people do varies enormously. The fee rates range from low to very high, and the length a consulting project may vary from hours to years. Clients who use consultants can be the owners of firms, managers of one level of seniority or another, or the main board directors of major corporations. Clients can also be staff in the public sector and not-for- profit organisations. Some consultants are employees of the firms the , , it is not easy to come up with a concise definition , , consulting takes place in, others are external but regular faces within an organisation, while many are individuals who appear in a client organisa- tion for a short time and never reappear again. Their areas of specialist expertise go from obscure pieces of business to generalist management advice. Given this huge vari- ety, what is it that is similar that enables them to be bundled together as management consultants? It is not easy to come up with a concise defini- tion that covers this assortment of roles. The problem with describing the role of a management consultant is compounded by the fact that some existing definitions have been writ- ten by people who are not consultants, and who do not understand fully what consultants do. But listening to professional consultants can equally be misleading. Those who are consultants have a vested interest in making the role sound majestiC and magical, and to bias any descrip- tion towards the type of work they specifically do. I have read definitions of management consultancy in sales brochures, books, dictionaries and various online encyclopaedias. A few definitions are the hopeless sum- marisations of people without any real understanding, some are correct but focus on irrelevant aspects of the role, many are good, but do not quite manage to encapsulate the role and its variations. Consultants and consultancy Given the wide variety of consultants, rather than starting with a defini- tion, I will list characteristics to provide an appreciation of the role of a consultant. As little in this world is absolutely black and white there are caveats with each one of these characteristics. Consultants do the following seven things: They provide advice and recommendations to managers, and may provide assistance with the implementation of the recommendations. Caveat: Consulting companies may provide a whole range of services, from pure consulting to training and outsourcing. Not all of this is consulting. Consulting is about providing useful advice, and helping managers to implement the advice. 2 They base their advice and recommendation on a set of skills and expertise, or intellectual property they have available to them. Caveat: This is what should happen. However, ask any experienced manager and they can probably tell you of the time they spoke to or even engaged someone who purported to be a consultant but who had very limited skills, experience or intellectual property. 3 They consult. This may sound obvious given the name, but it is often forgotten. What I mean by this is that consultants engage in dialogue with an organisation and its staff, and apply their expertise to develop recommendations, taking account of the specific needs and context of that organisation. Caveat: Some firms called consultancies do not consult. Such firms may be very successful in selling research, benchmarking data or other types of information. Consultants do not sell products or give the same advice to everyone. There is nothing wrong with selling a product, but irrespective of how it is branded, it is not management consulting. 4 They are involved with a given client on a temporary basis. Caveat: The length of a consulting project may be anything from hours to months. Occasionally, it may be years, although it is difficult to argue that someone who has worked continuously in one organisation for years is still working as a consultant. (Internal consultants work for one organisation, but they will be working on different projects across a range of departments or divisions.) It is not unusual for a consultant to work regularly for the same client, but each piece of work is of a limited duration. S They are independent. A consultant should be providing advice or recommendations irrespective of the internal politics and vested interests of an organisation or the managers who are their client. Understanding consultants and consultancy Caveat: Consultants are human, have their own business interest to consider, and naturally have their own biases. But a consultants biases should be independent of a clients biases. 6 They are not paid for from an organisations normal staff budgets. Caveat: A manager who wants to employ a consultant needs a budget for it. This is often true even for internal consultants who charge back their time, and if they do not, they remain an overhead to the rest of the business. 7 They add value to a manager and the client organisation by helping them to change. Value can take many forms, such as improved decision making, faster change implementation, reduced business risk and so on. Caveat: At least they should do! Reality is not always so clear cut. If we take these seven characteristics of a consultant and take the most pertinent points it is possible to develop a definition of a consultant that is true in most situations: A consultant is an independent advisor who adds value by helping managers to identify and achieve beneficial change appropriate to their situation. Essential consulting jargon To get the most from this book it is important that we start with a common understanding of the basic terminology surrounding manage- ment consultancy. Some words, or pieces of consulting jargon, will be used repeatedly through the book, and if you are new to the industry then its important you become familiar with these concepts. I am not generally a big advocate of jargon (see Chapter 11), but there are words and phrases that are continuously used by consultants. Most of these may be obvious and intuitively understandable, some are not specific to the consulting industry, but they are essential to know. Consultants tend to talk about clients, rather than customers. The con- cept of a client is explored in the next chapter. In general terms, the word is used both to refer to a specific manager who gives the consultant direc- tion on a consulting project, and the organisation in which that manager works . Hence a consultant may think of the client as Mr Peter Smith of the XYZ Company, or may consider it to be the XYZ Company. To Consultants and consultancy differentiate, when I refer to a client I am talking about a person (or group of people), when I am talking about the organisation the client works for I use the term client organisation. Once employed by a client, the specific consulting project being under- taken is usually referred to as an engagement or sometimes a live engagement. A client is one of a larger group of stakeholders a consultant must deal with. Stakeholders form a set of individuals who consultants must take into consideration when delivering an engagement. To win some work consultants engage in business development. Business development relates to time that is not (usually) chargeable to a client, and includes activities that are associated with marketing a business and , , consultants must normally write a description of the service they will provide pursing specific sales. The aim of business devel- opment is to identify opportunities, and then convert these opportunities into live engagements and hence have some chargeable time. An oppor- tunity is the situation in which a client has a need for some consulting support. To convert an oppor- tunity into an engagement and hence be able to charge …