A recent article in the Times on management theory and its applications can be summarised by its title “Goodbye to glib gurus and their gobbledegook”. The article is quite strong in its criticism of management consultants and their application of generic business process reengineering theory and techniques regardless of the industry or directorate of application. As any good strongly opinionated article should it has generated a swathe of equally strongly responses.
With today’s pressing economic conditions weighing down on many managers and budget holders, only a few are turning to management consultants to help them through. This is a function of the fact that it is difficult to accurately demonstrate a return on investment – even the quick remedies of cutting down on costs will usually reduce the overall business benefits especially when measured over a longer time period. This lack of demonstrable improvement means many managers cannot justify the expense, and they don’t have the patience to wait for improvements that will be delivered by 3 year strategic proposals. So it may not be that management consulting isn’t working, just that it isn’t timely enough to be relevant in a tough economic climate.
There is however an alternative form of consulting that is relevant and timely to a business environment in recession, one that is high on impact and low on cost, one that can and will drive short term benefits that are not at the expense of long term strategy, one that is above all measurable. This is the role of operational consultancy.
Rather than applying generic management theory to improve the efficiency of a process, an operational consultant will apply actual techniques to a business operation and see the implementation through to deployment. In applying techniques rather than theory, the return on investment is demonstrable. A management consultant tells you how; an operational consultant will show you how.
As with a lot of disciplines there is a lot of overlap, and one shouldn’t label all management consultants as having a lack subject matter expertise, as this is almost always incorrect. Instead think of it more in terms of how consultancies are engaged, both in terms of how they work with their clients and on what their client’s expect from them. Management consultancy isn’t invalid, it just needs to adapt. Advice is one thing, example is another.
In analytical marketing, our own sphere of expertise, we have devised, introduced and developed customer relationship strategies. In recent times it has been the actual delivery using existing , rather than new and cutting edge, capabilities that has been most sought after and relevant in the marketplace.
In a lot of cases the services we provide are to marketing departments that already have the vision, but with the economic downturn struggle to find the budgets for either full time recruitment or a defined fully scoped project with a high cost agency. They need something in the middle - an expert who doesn’t have to be full time and who is available at short notice, who can work without micro-management, and in short someone who will both do and deliver, and do that quickly.