What Is a Consulting Firm?
A consulting firm is a business made up of industry-specific experts who offer professional advice, guidance, and actionable solutions to organizations experiencing issues they (the organizations) can’t deal with in-house. Every company is bound to have problems; consulting firms are engaged to solve these problems.
By engaging a management consultant, your organization will receive external and objective advice that is not emotionally invested in the company. Consequently, management consultants typically are not prone to falling trap to cognitive biases such as the sunk cost fallacy, groupthink, and the status quo bias.
The Eight Objectives of Consulting
Here are consulting’s eight fundamental objectives, arranged hierarchically
1. Providing information to a client.
2. Solving a client’s problems.
3. Making a diagnosis, which may necessitate redefinition of the problem.
4. Making recommendations based on the diagnosis.
5. Assisting with implementation of recommended solutions.
6. Building a consensus and commitment around corrective action.
7. Facilitating client learning—that is, teaching clients how to resolve similar problems in the future.
8. Permanently improving organizational effectiveness.
From the above, you will see that not only will a management consultant help your organization diagnose problems, but you will also get recommendations on how to fix the problems and assistance in ensuring that the recommendations are properly implemented.
When Should You Consider Engaging a Consulting Firm?
A strategy consultant is needed when one of these happen:
- Your organization has a problem, and you believe you can pinpoint or have identified the problem.
- You have an undiagnosed performance problem, and you cannot decipher it.
- You need to make a difficult and high impact strategic choices.
Choosing The Right Consultant for Your Organization
After deciding that you need the help of an external consultant, the next step is to engage one. In choosing a consulting firm, watch out for the following:
- Prioritisation. Everything that shines isn’t gold. Your consultants should have the ability to immediately zoom in on what is really important for you and concentrate on that.
- Clarity. Your consultants should be able to communicate in a clear and concise manner.
- Focus on Value. Your consultant should be value driven.
- Thoroughness. While it is important to concentrate on the big picture and the key points, your consultants should be very thorough and pay close attention on every aspect of the project:
About our company
Index Consulting is a professional services firm offering leading-edge business research, management, and technical consulting services to business and government. We serve our clients through a core team of professionals on its staff and a network of associates in the industry, business, and academia with an unmatched combined experience and skills base. We at Index Consulting believe that our success is not only measured by delivered results but also by how trustworthy and professional our consultants are perceived. Our professionals are therefore guided not only by our professional codes but also by our core values of: client focus/partnership, result orientation, integrity, meritocracy, innovation, creativity, and rigour stewardship.
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