MANAGEMENT CONSULTING CONTENT TERMINOLOGY

Useful for:

First-year consultants looking to immediately improve professionalism and consultinglike writing on documents, emails, etc.

First-year consultants to understand and get involved in content discussions right on the
first day

Future aspired consultants looking to implicitly showing their consulting-like

background on resumes

Notice: This document only lists out content terminologies, those likely be used in final endproduct documents to be delivered to clients. For other informal jargons (those only daily verbal
conversations), please refer to other documents or our website.

No

Terms

Simple Definition

Examples of a typical consulting writing

Ad hoc

Non-structure

Lets turn this ad hoc process into a structured

and efficient one.

Alignment

Agreement

We have interviewed key stakeholders to get

client alignment on the overall approach.

Benchmark

A standard or point
of reference

Share of short-term debts is higher than

benchmarks across sub-holding companies.

Best practice

How things should

best be done

Both the documented policies and actual

activities undertaken are at best practice level.

CAGR

Compound annual
growth rate

Capability

What can you do

CAPEX

Change
management

Competitiveness

Capital
expenditure; or
cost on the
investment side
How to make
changes happen in
big organizations
Strength; ability to
compete

Market growth is expected to slow down but still

stays at healthy level of 8.4% CAGR over the next
5 years.
To be a marketing EPC company, we need to gain
several key capabilities. One of the most difficult
is to engineer a project.
Power, transport infrastructure and processed
industry will contribute 66% of total ABCs CAPEX
from now till 2015.
The board decided to implement the overall
change management plan.
XYZ lacks the capital to expand, hindering its
long-term cost competitiveness.

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Constraint

Difficulty; drawback; etc.

Half of the market is out of ABCs reach due to its

capital constraints.

11

Core business

Flagship; main
activity

Steel is one of the core business lines of XYZ in

terms of revenue.

Deliverables

End products of
consulting projects

Our deliverables for this workstream include the

master strategy and detail implementation plan
for the cement segment in the next 10 years.

Diagnostic
assessment

Initial research at
the beginning of
any consulting
project

Comprehensive diagnostic assessment should

be implemented as soon as possible.

12

13

14

Driver

Cause

Growth of industrial production is the largest

demand driver, accounting for XX% of total
electricity consumption in YYYY

15

End-to-end

Comprehensive;
complete

The supervisors should manage and construct

projects in an end-to-end manner.

16

Feasibility

How possible
something is

In project feasibility calculation, the

miscellaneous cost should only be 2-3% of total
cost.

17

Fitness

Appropriateness

You need to test this plants development fitness.

18

Footprint

19

Full-fledged

The firm has expanded its footprint in the real

estate and social infrastructure construction in
synergy with the urban development business.
Delta should become a full-fledged EPC attacker
by developing core strengths focusing on 3
segments

20

Function

Significant and
powerful presence
in something
Completely
developed or
established
E.g: HR, Finance,
Operation,
Strategy, etc.

21

Gaps

Difference

There are key gaps across all critical control

functions that ABC needs to address.

22

Governance

Leadership &
management
system

The complicated organization structure of XYZ

creates a multi-layers governance structure with
large size of total board member.

23

Impeccable

Perfect

Our staffs take pride in providing impeccable

service.

24

In line

About the same

This steel plant performance is in line with

market average but room for improvement exists

25

Infrastructure

System; foundation

Develop an IT infrastructure that enable stability

and growth

IT systems are vulnerable while HR and Finance

functions also show gaps.

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Initiatives

Actions

ABC could pursue performance improvement

initiatives to further strengthen hydro power
generations contribution to the Holding.

27

Leverage

Taking the
advantage of

Apple should leverage its strong brand name.

28

Levers

Ways to improve
things

There are three levers to boost sales conversion

rate at branches.

29

Market
perspective

Market
understanding

The first phase in our project is to get a bigpicture market perspective.

30

Mechanism

Method

We used robust review mechanism to control

residual risk during a project.

31

Milestones

Mini goals

The company passed the 6 million milestone

this year.

32

OPEX

33

Optimization

34

Organization

Operating
expenditure; or
cost on the
operation side
Improving toward
the best possible
outcome
How different parts
of a company is
How efficient and
effective things are
run
Significantly and
massively changing
something

Despite low investment, all OPEX items of this

project will be relatively high.
We have an experienced sales force but there is
still room for further optimization.
Over the last 6 weeks, we have examined the
organization structure, governance and internal
controls of XYZ.
The client needs to more actively manage capital
allocation and productivity, associated debts
with CAPEX and ensure debts are manageable.
The board guided three-year Human Capital
Transformation Plan including restructuring
divisions and alignment to business strategy.

35

Productivity

36

Restructuring

37

Rigorous

Comprehensive

Rigorously improve performance of ABC Steel to

remain competitive.

38

Roadmap

Overall timelinebased plan

The manager presented the outline of

implementation roadmap with key milestones
and resources requirements.

39

Root cause

Bottleneck that
causes the problem

The root cause of the problem lies in the poor

construction of the bridge.

Segment

The small piece

after breaking
down big problem,
industry,
workstream, etc.

The team should focus on projects in niche

segments.

40

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42

43

44

45

Soundness

Goodness

We first need to test this division operational

soundness.

Strategy

Where to play;
What to play; How
to play

The client should develop a holistic urban

development strategy to become the developerof-choice for large-scale urban development
projects.

Streamline

In organized
system and with
specializations

XYZs business support functions are largely oversized, overlapped and can be streamlined.

Small

Although fragmented and subscale, our plants

are geographically well positioned to serve
industries in the North.

Subscale

Synergy

46

Transformation

47

Turnaround

48

Utilization

Things when
combined create
greater value than
sum of each part
Significantly and
massively changing
something
Bringing something
from slums to the
surface

Synergy between different properties (e.g.

residential, shopping mall complex, office)
enhances total land value.
The firm tries to become cost leader in existing
business lines through lean manufacturing
transformation.
ABC cement is facing serious financial challenges
and chance for turnaround is small.

Make the best use

of something

Low sales volume has kept the capacity

utilization rate low across ABCs cement plants.
The western European cement market is
fragmented with many players across the value
chain. Some focus on raw limestone, some
specialize in clinker production, some just do
cement grinding, while a few others are best at
retailing.
Large scale project offers attractive value
proposition for potential foreign partners.

49

Value chain

Type of breaking
down business
activities based on
chronical steps

50

Value
proposition

Selling points; what

customers need

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