CONSULTANCY SKILLS

Consultancy Skills



Table of Contents

Introduction3

1-Initial Analysis of the Organization5

2-Strategic Issues That May Affect the Ability)6

3-Operational And Management Issues7

4-Obstacles That Might Be Encountered8

4a-Different Types Of Consultancy Engagement11

4b-Phases Of Activity Associated With A Typical Management12

4c-Management Tools And Techniques14

4d- Congruence between the Consulting Engagement16

Conclusion18

Recommendations19

References21

CONSULTANCY SKILLS

Introduction

Turning to the rise of management consultancy, numerous scholars have highlighted the dramatic growth in the size of the industry. The Kennedy Information Service reported that the industry was worth some $125 billion in 2004, up 80 fold on two decades previously. What was it that fueled this staggering growth? There were a number of factors at play: the socio-economic restructuring in western—and then ex-Soviet and eastern—economies, globalization, the rise of managerialism as a discourse, the marketization of the state, the commercialization of large accounting firms, and the developments in information technology. The corollary is that large management consultancies are now important players within the global economy, to the extent that some commentators have suggested that their influence is such that we are seeing the rise of the McKinsey state—a reference to one of the most influential consultancies. Given their importance, it is worth considering in more detail the role that consultants play in organizations.

As we have seen, early representations of management consulting characterized consultants as advice givers to management. This characterization, combined with the independence of the consultant as an outsider and the consultant's range of experiences drawn from other contexts and specific expertise, at face value supports the notion of consultant as advice giver. In recent years, organization theorists have opened up the study of consultants as a serious area of inquiry. Andrew Sturdy, in an article published in 1997 in the Journal of Management Studies, argued that consultancy was predicated on creating relationships with clients—generally managers—that imbued clients with a sense of certainty and confidence about the future while at the same time reinforcing their insecurities. Sturdy asserts that this relationship is further complicated by the active role played by clients in developing strategies to manage consultants, which in turn opens up the potential for insecurity on the part of the consultants. Sturdy's work highlights the importance of the consultant-client nexus in understanding management consultancy.

In a similar vein, Robin Fincham, in an article in the Journal of Management Studies in 1999, argued that the clientconsultant relationship takes on the characteristics of a market relation that hinges on the corporate power and the knowledge base of both the consultants and their clients. Both Fincham and Sturdy emphasize the relational nature of power relations between consultants and their clients, which is in contrast to some accounts that cast the consultants as powerful and clients as powerless. Take for instance, Alfred Kieser's dystopian view of consultants: In a 2002 book chapter titled “Managers as Marionettes? Using Fashion Theories to Explain the Success of Consultancies,” he painted a picture of consultants as creating demand for their services by, in effect, scaremongering managers with the aim of making them dependent on management ...