Multi-disciplinary consulting: The best thing since sliced bread?

One of the most intriguing things to emerge from our new report on the consulting industry across Europe, the Middle East and India is the growth in multi-disciplinary projects.

Several of the large firms we interviewed said that the proportion of revenue coming from such projects has risen substantially in the last year, in some cases eclipsing the growth of small, specialised practice areas.  Yet the clients we interviewed earlier in the year were adamant that they wanted to buy more from niche firms, partly because the latter are thought to have greater depth of expertise than their bigger, broader rivals, and partly because they’re cheaper.

Our first reaction was that clients weren’t following through on their intentions.  After all, we’ve heard similar statements before – ‘We’re going to pay for consulting services based on performance, not time and materials’ and ‘We’re only going to use the consulting firms on our preferred supplier lists’.  Why should this be any different?  But further analysis suggests the situation is more complex.  Most clients dislike the idea of buying a range of different specialist services from a single source on the time-honoured grounds that a consulting firm which is a jack of all trades is inevitably a master of none.  On the other hand, they’re also aware that breaking up a project into separate streams of specialist work, each of which will be done by a different, albeit expert, supplier, creates management migraines.  Multi-disciplinary consulting is growing because it combines the best of these two alternatives.

A good analogy is bread.  The input from a niche consulting firm is the equivalent of a single slice of bread – a distinct, expert and focused solution to a precise issue or opportunity.  You can construct a ‘meal’ based on many different slices, each one designed to meet a very specific need, but it can be quite hard to eat it.  One-stop-shopping, by contrast, assumes that complex issues can be resolved by a single solution – a loaf in our analogy.  In a multi-disciplinary project, each slice is distinct – the consulting firm brings deep and specific expertise to bear – but is also part of an integrated whole, so the costs and hassle involved in assembling the ‘loaf’ are minimised.

The challenge, of course, is how to articulate these distinctions.  Sub-branding the ‘slices’ is almost certainly part of the solution; highlighting the use of outside experts may be as well.  But the danger is that the consulting industry returns to what it knows best and talks about multi-disciplinary work in a way that makes it sound remarkably like a return to one-stop-shopping – which is the opposite of what clients actually want.