Consulting

To keep things specific, we’d be focusing on what we’ll term as business consultancy. More specifically, we’d be examining the firms that make up this wide-ranging industry. The employees of business consulting firms all aim to improve their clients performance – they are not hired to maintain the status quo, but to change it. The success of a consulting project is measured by the extent to which a consulting firm is able to achieve concrete results, through the changes it not just recommends, but carries out as well.

Consulting starts when a client wants to improve performance in some part of its business, but recognises that it does not have the expertise to do it. It becomes particularly challenging when the client needs to resolve the issue within a short frame of time. It is prohibitively expensive, maybe even impossible, for the client to train its own staff to solve the problem. This is where consulting firms come in. They provide external pools of expertise that clients can immediately use on a short-term basis. Consulting firms thus provide economic access to specialised expertise. The cost of training and developing these teams of external experts are borne by the consulting firms, who spread the cost over multiple clients.

Consultants are particularly good at applying a systematic approach to identifying and solving a wide range of business problems. Each consulting firm uses its own, more or less unique, methodology for analysis, and its consultants are trained to apply the methodology on all projects.

And finally, there’s the fact that consultants are smart people. The consulting industry regularly draws the top minds in business into its ranks and has an aggressive campus recruitment programme to hire to best fresh graduates. Whether you’re looking for an innovative solution, or a thorough analysis, chances are that you’ll find the expert you’d need from a consulting firm.

The scope of consultancy covers three broad areas, viz. Strategy, Systems and Organization.

The business world is desperate for consulting help. With excess staff being cut down, most organisations lack the technical, strategic and project management skills to handle the benumbing rate of technological and market change.

The consulting industry is trying its best to accommodate the demand. Big consulting firms are inhaling new employees, gulping up smaller firms and merging with peers.

Consulting industry has responded creatively to the changing needs of clients, leading to the growth of a thriving industry. The insights of history provide guidance as consultants seek the innovations to meet the future needs of clients.