Welcome to Management Consulted!
I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director and as an ex-Bain consultant, I'm here today
to talk about a court topic that many people actually don't know the answer to,
which is, what is consulting? Now this is a question that when I was flying home
on a Thursday afternoon after a long week at Bain someone would ask me
sitting next to me on the plane, "what do you do as a consultant?" Oftentimes I,
especially early on my career, didn't have a great answer so this is something
that I've developed over time in order to better explain what a consultant does.
Now just first, a little bit of history - consulting came about at the turn of the
20th century as the industries around the world moved from family-owned to
conglomerates to larger companies that were more diversified and had external
ownership. There was increasing accountability, which led to accounting
standards. And along with accounting, there were experts that came along to
review a company's books and operations and offer advice on how to improve them.
Thus, consulting was born. Although there are many jokes that we could tell
about consulting today, we're going to focus about some of the serious nuts and bolts.
So as I said, the industry was founded in the turn of the 20th century,
and really since then the core of consulting has been to offer one of
three types of business advice to key businesses around the world. The first
type of consulting is increasing sales, the second type of consulting is
decreasing costs, and the third type of consulting is expanding organizational
design to enhance one of those goals. As we, over the next series of videos, go
through a process of explaining some of the different tools that consultants use,
remember these three things are really at the heart of everything that any good
consultant will do. Now the deliverables for a consultant at the end of their
project are again one of three things - the first is a final report. The final
report is where the consultant compiles all of the information that they
generated on behalf of the client into a key set of recommendations along with
the substantiation behind the recommendations. It's the sum result of
all the research and analysis they did for the clients over the term of the
project. These reports sometimes are utilized,
other times they collect dust on someone's bookshelf, but in general,
they're an important part of the consulting process. They signify the end
of an engagement. The second thing is an operational model usually delivered in
Microsoft Excel, Access, or another database program. The operational
model will be focused on some kind of enhancement that the client is
recommended to do, and it's a way for them to actually put the tool to use.
So an operational model for example could be instituted as a dashboard to look at
KPIs, or key performance indicators. It could also be instituted as a way to
manage costs by identifying which series of processes should be identified for
each key product or service. It can also be a pricing model that identifies which
customers should be offered certain pricing. These models can cover a wide
range of materials, but in general, usually it's a major file that's handed
over, and it's implemented into the clients processes. The third and
potentially the most important deliverable for a consultant themselves
is role on work. Role on work is when the end of a client engagement comes, and a
consultant finds another problem for the client to solve. So after the final
report is generated and after the operational model is delivered, the
client will then begin to re-engage on a new or expanded problem of the business.
So just in summary, the consulting industry came about at the turn of the
20th century. Consulting is really focused in one of three problems -
increasing sales, decreasing costs, or developing organizations. And the final
deliverables for a consultant are a final report, an operational model, and
ultimately role on work. We look forward to having you in a
future video with Management Consulted, and if you have any questions in the
meantime, please visit us at our website managementconsulted.com.