Advice vs implementation

By Alison Huntington.

There are many aspects of the 90s that I would not want to see return. Bell-bottom jeans. Dial-up internet. Aqua’s Barbie Girl.

Another aspect of the 90s I’d like to be permanently erased from my memory is SAP, but like scrunchies, it’s back. “I'd say the SAP space is starting to feel like the late 90s, turn of the century again in terms of the volume of work,” says Geoff Vickrey, the managing partner of EY’s Americas performance improvement group. And he’s not alone: Many others are likening the current climate to those heady days of neck chokers and Adidas tracksuits.

Every time I've heard somebody talk about the move from strategy to implementation in consulting recently, something has been bothering me. Finally I've worked out what it is: in consulting terms strategy isn't the opposite of implementation; advice is.

Almost every consulting firm is laying claim to the space that lies somewhere between advice and execution / implementation.

Pure advice has been widely discredited by clients frustrated with the number of recommendations from consultants that are never acted on. Pure implementation would take consulting firms into outsourcing’s dangerous, low-margin territory. So most firms, like superpowers itching for battle over a rich but obscure Balkan state, say they do both. All of which is ironic when you look at the way they behave.

For some time now I’ve talked about the Four Ps of consulting, the four fundamental reasons why an organisation will use consultants: people (the access to specialist skills not available internally); process (methodology and momentum); perspective (the ability to see the wood for the trees); and politics (validating a decision already taken if not actually articulated).

To these, I think we should add a fifth: getting things done.

Increasingly high-profile concerns over the difficulty of valuing the benefits of consulting services is putting pressure on the industry to provide tangible proof of its impact. At the same time, procurement people, whose focus on daily rates has blurred the distinction between consultants and contractors, are waking up to the need to build consulting projects around outcomes, not inputs.