Know-how -
and knowing how to implement it
Although apocryphal, it is still a pertinent story. A
critical machine in a large factory breaks down, holding up production worth
tens of thousands of dollars a day. When the in-house experts cannot fix the
problem, the factory manager calls in an external mechanic. For a few minutes,
this outside mechanic walks up and down the machine, occasionally poking things
with his screwdriver. Then, in a flash, he leans in to tighten a screw and the
machine starts up. But the factory manager is less delighted a week later, when
an invoice for US $10,000 hits his desk. He rings up to query the amount.
‘That's right,' says the mechanic. ‘It's a dollar for tightening the screw - and
9,999 dollars for knowing which screw to fix.'
The value that a consultant brings is not determined by the
amount of time he or she spends working on a problem, but by the experience and
techniques he or she can bring to bear on what appears to be an intractable
problem. Perhaps more than any other area of consulting, ‘operational'
consulting benefits from a wealth of management tools and techniques. However,
the skill of the consultant does not just lie in bringing a briefcase full of
techniques to a given problem, but in knowing which are appropriate and how to
apply them. Consultants are often criticized for coming up with ideas that prove
impossible to implement in practice, but that is far from the case with the
projects represented here. Ashridge Consulting used Eli Goldratt's Theory of
Constraints to demonstrate that a system - in this case a community hospital -
could only run as fast as the speed of its weakest link. Kepner-Tregoe brought
clearly defined intellectual capital to its work at Sun Microsystems - a
problem-solving methodology. But the firm's contribution was not confined to
telling Sun Microsystems' engineers something new, but in ensuring that it was
used on a consistent basis. PA Consulting Group's Systems Engineering
methodology was one of the main reasons why GCHQ wanted to work with the firm,
providing it with a means of analysing the interactions between its complex
processes, 5,000 staff and more than 60 independent IT systems. The Chief
Executive of BT click&buy described the consulting team from Edengene as
pragmatic as well as smart: ‘Edengene's delivery was really excellent, from the
more academic analysis at the start of the project, right through to
implementation.'
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