Management consulting

Management consulting is a method of providing practical advice and help for improving
management and business practices.
 Fritz Steele: “Any form of providing help on the content process, or structure of a
task or series of tasks, where the consultant is not actually responsible for doing the
task itself but is helping those who are”
 Peter Block: “You are consulting any time you try to change or improve a situation
but have no direct control over the implementation”
It is also a professional service, with standards and principles.
 Larry Greiner and Robert Metzger: “Management consulting is an advisory service
contracted for and provided to organizations by specially trained and qualified
persons who assist, in an objective and independent manner, the client organization
to identify management problems, analyze such problems, recommend solutions to
these problems, and help, when requested, in the implementation of solutions.
 International Council of Management Consulting: “Management consulting is the
provision of independent advice and assistance about the process of management to
clients with management responsibilities”
For Kubr (2002) management consulting can be described as “transferring to clients knowledge
required for managing and operating businesses and other organizations”.
“Management consulting s an independent professional advisory service assisting
managers and organizations to achieve organizational purposes and objectives by solving
management and business problems, identifying and seizing new opportunities, enhancing,
learning and implementing changes.”
It implies that the consultant share knowledge and expertise with the client instead of trying to
hide and withhold it; the client participates as closely and intensively as possible in the
assignment; and both parties spare an effort to make the assignment a valuable learning
experience.
It embraces two critical dimensions of client organization: The technical dimension (business
processes and problems and the way they are analyzed are resolved) and the human dimension
(interpersonal relationships with the client and within the client’s organization).
Consultants, irrespectively of the field of intervention and the specific method used, are required
for five main purposes:

 To achieve organizational purposes and objectives: All consulting pursues the

purpose of helping clients to achieve their business, social or other goals. It has
to add value to the client organization, and this value should be a tangible
measurable contribution to achieving the client’s principal purposes.
 To solve management and business problems
  To identify and seize new opportunities: Consultant as source of valuable
information and ideas that can be tuned into a wide range of initiatives,
innovations and improvements in any area or function of business.
 To enhance learning
 To implement changes.
Consultants’ assistance will be given in one or more of the following ten ways:
 Providing information
 Providing specialist resources
 Establishing business contacts and linkages
 Providing expert opinion
 Doing diagnostic work
 Developing action proposals
 Developing systems and methods
 Planning and managing organizational changes
 Training and developing management and staff
 Counselling and coaching
The consultant role

The Consulting Process

Set of activities undertaken by the consultant and client that are required for achieving the
desired purposes and changes. According to Kubr (2002), the consulting process is composed by
5 phases:
 Entry. Includes the first contacts, discussions on what the client would like to
achieve, clarification on roles and negotiation of a consulting contract.
  Diagnosis. In-depth diagnosis of the problem to be solved. Definition of the purposes
to be achieved and assessing the client’s performance, resources, and needs.
 Action planning. Development and evaluation of one or several alternative solutions.
 Implementation. Acid test for the feasibility of the proposals developed. Changes
proposed start turning into reality.
 Termination. Final reports are presented and discussed, and mutual commitments are
settled.
Kubr, M. (2002). Management Consulting. Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office
Management consultants are important influential management “fashion setters” that set trends
in management tools and techniques; defined as one type of “knowledge entrepreneur”.
Fashionable in this regard means rational and progressive.
The management consulting industry exists because of the presence of persistent organizational
and management problems which creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and exerts pressure on
managers to be seen to be acting both rationally and innovatively.
According to Hilmer and Donaldson (1996), management is a fertile field for fads and quick
fixes because the problems are intractable, yet the pressure to be seen to be “doing something” is
intense because many management problems are complex and persistent, and executives often
become frustrated.
Management consulting firms are knowledge intensive. They seek to sell knowledge about the
types of challenges that plague organizations and sell answers to the organizational and
management problems.
According to Blunsdon (2002), organizations’ persistent problems can be grouped in 4
categories:
 Scarcity. Resource limitations, limited inputs for production and a lack of demand for
organizational outputs. Scarcity creates opportunities, or a market for solutions in the
form of techniques and tools that focus on organizational efficiency.
 Uncertainty. Uncertainty posted by internal organizational and external
environmental change threaten organizations. Information scarcity and organizational
uncertainty require solutions that provide effectiveness. It deals with problems
concerning decision-making, communication processes, information gathering and
analyses, and strategy and goal attainment.
 Instability. Shared values and beliefs within the company and organizational
legitimacy in terms of the wider environment are necessary for organizational
stability. Techniques, tools and programs developed that are concerned with
organizational members form the basis of commitment to the organization and its
public face or image.
 Conflict. Tensions and divergent interests occur as natural consequence of the
employee-management relationship, the concerns of special interest groups and other
pluralist interests. They also need to present an image of conformity for a wider
 institutional environment. Consulting then focuses in extracting compliance from
employees and conformity to the constraints imposed by wider regulatory systems.

Blunsdon, B. (2002) Beneath fashion: why is there market for management consulting services?
[University paper]. Retrieved from
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.499.2914&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Key performance indicators
Key performance indicators (KPI) are measurement practices that companies use to asses the
outcome of an individual business improvement tactic (Ivanovs, 2016).
By distributing KPIs equally along departments, the company aligns individual efforts towards a
common objective, vision and corporate strategy. According to Latham (2007) it is top
management responsibility to ensure that KPIs fit the company’s strategy and that decision
makers understand them in detail to ensure that al areas of the operation follow the same rules.