Friday 7th Sep, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
What drives a great client experience? You’d be forgiven for thinking that there was one rule that applied to everyone. After all, we’ve written extensively about convergence in the consulting market, and how clients struggle to see much difference between firms, which kind of suggests that everyone has figured out the same winning formula.
But our data paints a more nuanced picture than that—the drivers of high scores (by which we mean a high proportion of people speaking positively in our client survey) can vary significantly from one firm to the next. Let’s take firms that people often lump together—McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG hereafter)—and look at the drivers of positive perceptions about their digital transformation work.
The greatest driver of high scores for McKinsey is the extent to which it’s seen to have an innovative approach to its work.
Tuesday 28th Aug, 2018
By Rachel Duk.
If our analyst team could earn a pound each time we heard from consulting leaders that “talent is a big challenge”, we’d all have taken early retirement by now, spending our days swilling Dom Perignon on our superyacht. Unfortunately for all involved, we’re still locked away in a dark basement frenetically examining the consulting industry, while firms are no closer to solving the talent conundrum. We all know the drill: Great people are in short supply, the much-maligned Millennial generation are less committed than Leonardo DiCaprio in a new relationship, and those blasted start-ups are, mysteriously, more alluring to young professionals than the concept of process-mapping in the back-end of nowhere. And while some consulting firms are developing retention strategies for their flighty talent pool, many more accept this situation as the new status quo.
Yet as a Big Four graduate myself, I’m convinced there’s a better way.
Friday 27th Jul, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
If the consulting industry has been really good at one thing, then it’s at taking perfectly decent words and loading them up with so much promise and ambition that they crack under the strain. “Transformation” is teetering dangerously close to the edge of this at the moment: Digital technology offers so much in terms of potential impact on organisations’ top and bottom lines, but clients are increasingly demanding proof, evidence that work is, in fact, being transformed.
Another such word is innovation. As a concept it’s of critical importance to the consulting industry. Our data has repeatedly highlighted not only the extent to which a firm can demonstrate how an innovative approach will determine whether it will be short-listed for work, but also the significant shortfall between the level of innovation clients are looking for and what firms are delivering in practice. One of the most important factors in deciding which firm to use, innovation is also one of the areas where consulting firms perform worst. In fact, there are only three areas in which firms are perceived to be even weaker: price (which we’ll discount for present purposes—we’ve never met a client who didn’t want a reduction in fee rates); responsiveness and flexibility; and speed of delivery. Those latter two are interesting because we think they link to innovation. Most clients we speak to aren’t interested in blue-sky thinking: When they write in the RFP that they’re looking for an innovative approach, they’re really saying that they want a firm that can bring fresh ideas from other industries and/or countries, one that isn’t so hide-bound by process and organisational baggage that it can’t change the way it works to accommodate a client’s unique set of circumstances and deliver tangible improvements more quickly than clients can do by themselves.
Monday 26th Mar, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
I used to think that the consulting industry had a problem with innovation. But I was wrong.
New technology has unleashed an explosion of activity as client organisations work out how best to harness big data, the Internet of Things, the cloud... and… and… and… And the consultants who work with them have been responding in kind, pulling capabilities from different practice areas, combining it with industry knowledge and the kind of rapid development you only get if you can get small teams of people to focus on one issue at a time. Right across the consulting industry, from the very largest consulting firms to the positively petite, we see examples of creative thinking. Everyone is alert to the potential for leveraging solutions developed for one client to many. Tools developed for a single organisation can be applicable to entire markets.
Tuesday 22nd Aug, 2017
By Edward Haigh.
Incumbent suppliers appear to have more of an advantage than you might think. Not only are they the ones with both feet inside the door–and therefore in a fairly decent position to slam it shut on anyone trying to get one of their feet in, but they’re also thought, by their clients, to be better than anyone else.
Fiona Czerniawska’s recent blog set out the size of this advantage, revealing that existing clients are significantly more likely than prospects to describe the quality of a consulting firm’s work in positive terms. Behind which you can’t help wondering if the broader reputation of the consulting industry is coming into play: Clients suspect they’ve been lucky and got the one firm that’s really good. The problem, as Fiona put it, is that “nothing you can do can communicate what you do as well as doing it.
Wednesday 19th Jul, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
One of the things I’ve always liked about Accenture (and I like quite a lot of things about them) is its apparent capacity to reinvent itself on a fairly regular basis. ERP, outsourcing, offshoring: Accenture has often been the first mover, prepared to go out on a limb in the market, often, I suspect, at the cost of turmoil behind the scenes. It puts a strategic stake in the ground, then expects the organisation to catch up.
So what are we to make of its campaign around “new”?
Thursday 22nd Jun, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Consultants often talk about pain points, but it’s hard to find one that’s either more painful or more pointed than Diabetesville, the name given by the media to Cameron County, Texas, where almost a third of the population has Type II diabetes.
Tuesday 9th May, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Wavestone, in collaboration with Société Générale, has launched an initiative aimed at promoting innovation in the cybersecurity space, raising some interesting questions about the role of innovation, not just in the very fast-moving, high-tech cybersecurity market, but in consulting more broadly.
Clients think innovation is important: in fact, it’s the quality they consider most important in a consulting firm, according to our research. At the same time, they often struggle to define what it means to be innovative and fully admit that they can’t point to individual consulting firms that are generally more innovative than others. Individual consultants, and sometimes entire project teams are recognised as taking an innovative approach, but clients remain sceptical of the extent to which this translates to an innovative culture across the firm as a whole.
Tuesday 17th Jan, 2017
By Fiona Czerniawska.
You should never say never, but it’s tempting. For all their occasional moments of robotic behaviour (the cool, analytical brain, the steely gaze, the Terminator-like tendency to say, “I’ll be back”), the best strategy consultants aren’t machines but perceptive human beings capable of taking into account the emotional context that surrounds a difficult decision and its execution, as much as the facts.
But parts of the strategy consulting process could be automated.
Thursday 30th Jun, 2016
By B.J. Richards.
Several months ago, I was talking with a gentleman in the fitness industry who excitedly told me about an app he’s working on. Its purpose is to encourage friendships among his gym’s members, presumably in the interest of building brand loyalty. Among the app’s many features, it will send you notifications throughout the day when someone from your favorite fitness class is nearby, “so you could maybe get together and grab a coffee or something.”
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