Technologists, Coordinators and Bridges From the projects described in this chapter, it appears that consultants have three distinct roles to play when it comes to implementing electronic trading initiatives. The first, not surprisingly, relates to the technology itself. Part of the role ... [full story]

Heterogeneity, not uniformity Whereas the monolithic systems of the 1990s were predicated on the idea of bringing the disparate functions of an organization together by standardizing processes and centralizing control, the initiatives described in these case studies are indicative of a ... [full story]

Making good use of tried and tested ‘new' technology Each of the organizations featured in the case studies in this chapter faced significant challenges. London's was the world's largest congestion charging scheme to be developed. The JTrack system for the Criminal ... [full story]

Technology Exploitation Overview The four case studies in this chapter illustrate the extent to which IT and IT consulting have evolved over the last 10 years. In the mid-1990s, it was the private sector that set the pace. A large-scale IT project might ... [full story]

Strategy Consulting: Smaller, Leaner, Fitter Strategy consulting was the main casualty of the downturn in the consulting market after 2001. Yet, as most consultants will tell you, strategy consulting has by no means disappeared. Certainly, with few organizations brave enough to ... [full story]

Business Strategy Overview Strategy has not had an easy time since the millennium. Squeezed by a combination of economic downturn and endemic scepticism about the visionary ideas of the e-business boom, most strategic planning departments - if they still exist - have ... [full story]

Providing incentives to change Resolving operational problems often depends on getting diverse groups of people to work together. The fifth and final facet of the best operational consulting is to ensure, once a change has been made, that it sticks. At ... [full story]

Passing the baton from consultant to client Skills transfer is something that clients consistently put high on their agenda when it comes to hiring consultants - it is not enough to use consultants to solve a problem, they have to show ... [full story]

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 ... [full story]

Still seeing the trees Of course, problems viewed in isolation can be highly misleading. Cut out as much of the white noise as possible that typically surrounds a business problem, and you can be left with something that can look deceptively ... [full story]

Seeing the wood for the trees One of the key ways in which consultants can help improve performance is by pinpointing the underlying cause of a problem. Every one of us finds it hard to step back from our daily lives: ... [full story]

Versatility and flexibility Of course, taking a wide range of different requirements into account necessitates not only intense user involvement, but also an ability to respond to changes. None of these projects would have succeeded if those in charge had adopted ... [full story]

Speed But flexibility can be a double-edged sword: ensuring that the final system will meet a complex set of requirements increases the risk of delay. Too many changes can make a project seem never-ending. Yet all of these projects were completed ... [full story]

Getting the Technology Right Electronic trading is necessarily about moving information across systems, allowing (at a corporate level) organizations to exchange information quickly and accurately, and (at an individual level) people to access common sources of information easily, irrespective of where ... [full story]

Pull Not Push The first generation of knowledge management and workflow systems opted for the stick, rather than the carrot, approach. Compliance was everything: once systems had been developed, people had to be made to use them. This is not a ... [full story]

Electronic Trading Overview Information is the life blood of a joined-up world. Yet, successive initiatives - knowledge management, e-business - have failed to deliver a free flow of information to those who need it in many, if not most, organizations. Old challenges ... [full story]

Delivery Accenture's work with Sainsbury's begins with a consulting premise - how best to improve business performance - and translates this into practical changes to systems and processes. While advising its client on how to achieve those improvements, it is also ... [full story]

Independent advice PA Consulting Group's role was to advise the MHRA throughout the outsourcing process. It worked with the Agency to convert a high-level strategy into a practical set of requirements and to draw up a proposition that balanced the MHRA's ... [full story]

From Advice to Delivery Outsourcing is big business for the consulting industry. 2001-03 has seen a significant shift away from more traditional consulting services towards outsourcing and outsourcing-related work. Philip Geiger is a Board Director at the IT consulting firm, Xayce: You ... [full story]

Second-Generation Outsourcing Although the need to minimize costs still plays an important role in the decision to outsource, all three of the organizations featured in this chapter were seeking additional benefits. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) wanted to ... [full story]

Outsourcing Outsourcing has come a long way from the days in which organizations saw it as a way of washing their hands of a problem and cutting costs into the bargain. Once primarily a defensive strategy - shedding non-core work - ... [full story]

It Consulting: Leaner and Fitter? For IT consultants, each of the five factors above represents a significant change in their way of working: indeed, to a large extent, IT consulting has had to reinvent itself since the late 1990s. Internet technology ... [full story]

Multi-sourcing The IT department of 10 years ago might well have expected large-scale projects to be undertaken by a single supplier, but it is rare these days for clients to ‘single source'. The complexity of the work and technology involved means ... [full story]

The Five Pillars of Operational Consulting The case studies in this chapter highlight five fundamental ways in which consulting firms help organizations to improve their performance. [full story]

Operational Performance Overview At any point in the economic cycle - bull years and bear years - the vast majority of businesses are performing neither very well nor very badly. Their markets are not growing; their cost bases are relatively stable; there ... [full story]

Advising Versus Doing It is also clear from these three cases that consultants are playing an increasingly important role in the day-to-day running of the HR function. Consulting here is not a nice-to-have, an optional extra: instead, consultants are performing fundamental ... [full story]

Projects That Exceed Client Expectations If the four attributes outlined above constitute the bedrock of good consulting, what distinguishes the best? Using the MCA's survey of the projects submitted for its annual awards, it is possible to separate out the factors that ... [full story]

Skills transfer This is - or should be - the bottom line of consulting. Clients hire consultants because there are skills they need, but lack. They could take the option of hiring a full-time employee to plug a particular gap, but ... [full story]

Leadership Specialist knowledge and practical experience provide the platform on which consultants build their credibility. But good consultants do not stop there: they use that credibility as a justification for having unambiguous, authoritative opinions. This is good news for clients, who ... [full story]

Specialist experience No client wants to waste time familiarizing a consultant with the issues faced by a particular sector. Thus, when it comes to hiring consultants, clients consistently rate the consultants' understanding of a sector or other specialist know-how far higher ... [full story]

Project, time and cost management Clients want consultants to play by the rules. Once a project has been agreed, clients want consultants to do what they have said they would, when they have said they would do it. They also want ... [full story]

What Sets Excellent Consulting Apart? Foundations of Good Consulting The factors that distinguish good consulting probably have not changed since the early 1980s, when the era of the independent adviser gave way to that of the large-scale, complex projects that dominate today's ... [full story]