1.5Evolving concepts and scope of management consulting

It is important to be aware of some dilemmas in the nature and purpose of management consulting and to understand how they are reflected in evolving consulting concepts and practices.

Advice or results?

We have shown that consultants are advisers and remain in this position except when they are recruited by clients to become temporary members of staff. Advisers have no authority to make decisions about a client’s business and their influence has limits. The assignment may be too short and understaffed to produce tangible results, the client may be unwilling to follow the advice given, staff may not collaborate or their resistance and inertia may be too strong, or the consultant may be unavailable for follow-up and debugging. Even the soundest advice alone cannot provide absolute assurance that there will be tangible, measurable, and sustainable results.

There is therefore a growing tendency to use consultants for more than providing advice. “Advice” tends to be defined more and more loosely and liberally, and consultants are increasingly viewed as assistants, helpers, service providers or even service brokers who work with clients on various issues for as long as necessary to make sure that tangible and measurable results are achieved. Also, consultant remuneration tends to be increasingly related to results, rather than to time spent on providing advice. Clients would be wise not to get bogged down in vaguely defined time-based assignments with unclear consultant responsibilities and uncertain results. In large and expensive projects, which are often focused on management systems and information technology, clients need to have safeguards against escalating costs, low reliability and failure to meet set parameters and promised performances. Consultants may be offered roles and positions likely to increase their impact on results or to give them more authority and responsibility for achieving certain results in client organizations. New ways of remunerating consultants have become widespread, including equity and stock options (see Chapters 30 and 36). In this way the consultant is clearly accepting to be dependent on the wider and longer-term business results and prosperity of the client, sometimes even beyond the scope of improvements that can be attributed to the consultant’s intervention.

Management consulting, business consulting, or any consulting?

Traditionally the scope of the services offered by management consultants was confined to functions, subjects and problems regarded as part of management,