The Challenge of Consulting Projects

While clients and consultants mostly agree on the factors taken into account in selecting a consulting firm, there is more variation in their perceptions of the hurdles that have to be overcome. Both sides recognize that timescales and complexity are often significant problems (see Tables 1.3 and 1.4): after all, no one's going to call consultants in to do something easy.

Table 1.3: Consulting firms' perceptions of the challenges to be overcome in consulting projects, ranked by importance
Rank	Attribute
1	Stakeholder buy-in
2	Complexity of project
3	Time frame
4	Cultural challenges
5	Expectations of client
6	Scale of project
7	Communication with client
8	Consultancy firm's understanding of the business
9	Changing requirements
10	Budget limitations
11	Skill limitations
12	Changing deadlines
13	Changing personnel (client)
14	Changing personnel (consulting firm)

Table 1.4: Clients' perceptions of the challenges to be overcome in consulting projects, ranked by importance
Rank	Attribute
1	Cultural challenges
2	Time frame
3	Complexity of project
4	Scale of project
5	Consultancy buy-in
6	Resource limitations
7	Budget limitations
8	Skill limitations
9	Consulting firm's understanding of the client's business
10	Expectations of consultants
11	Changing requirements
12	Changing deadlines
13	Changing personnel (client)
14	Changing personnel (consulting firm)

Both sides also realize that buy-in is important. For clients, ensuring the commitment of the consulting firm is perceived to be a significant challenge. For consultants, getting the support of stakeholders is vitally important. Indeed, many of the case studies in this book involve situations where there are multiple stakeholders, public and private sector, many of whom have not worked together before. Small wonder, then, that an increasing number of contracts for consulting projects now involve some degree of shared risks and rewards.

Clients, however, attach more significance to the cultural challenges than consultants do, suggesting that clients remain more sensitive to the impact consultants can have - as outsiders - on internal politics. Clients also rate limitations - of resources, budgets and skills - slightly more seriously than consultants do, again suggesting that consultants may sometimes downplay the constraints that clients are under.

Understanding a client's business is significantly more of a challenge for consultants doing strategy work than in other types of consulting. This may have something to do with the changes in personnel on the client side which clients highlight as a problem themselves. And it is no surprise that cultural challenges are rated as more serious by clients and consultants when it comes to HR consulting. By contrast, the obstacles faced in change management consulting projects seem more logistical - changes to requirements, deadlines and people. The fact that clients rather than consultants draw attention to these issues suggests that change management projects can be frustrating - perhaps a function of their largely intangible outputs and the fact that they have to adapt to changing circumstances.

Buy-in and culture were considered to present fewer problems by both clients and consultants when it came to IT-related consulting, but client expectations and communications were thought to be more of an issue. Interestingly, outsourcing was almost the mirror image of this, which may reflect the fact that outsourcing projects tend to be longer-term. Cultural issues and buy-in were more important here, but changes to requirements and people were seen to be less of a challenge.