[Closed] Any management consultants on here?

Yep.

Don't mention it at parties though. It's a guaranteed conversation-killer.

[party killing mode]

OK, teaboy - what do you do & what size consultancy do you work for?

Worked for Accenture for a while - strategic IT transformation stuff. Left as I got bogged down in IT and hated it.

Now: internal consultant for a big northern company. It's much better -annual market review and strategy setting, mergers and acquisitions, basically go and make a nuisance of myself and get other people to improve things.

If you get somewhere good it's ace. If you get pushed to where you don't want to be, it's hellish.

Also, remember that the work is where the client is. I went 2 years at Accenture without seeing the office - all was on client sites from Aberdeen to Colchester.

Got to go now. Back later.

I did a couple of years at Accenture, never again. The client staff universally feared and hated MCs in equal measures, and for good reason. Money is good but you sell your soul.

Edit: just saw you're already a lawyer, you have no soul so you'd probably fit right in 🙂

Hmm. Interesting. A lot of the consulting roles I see (at least with the large consultancies) are very IT focussed. Not my thing.

My background is large (international) law firms, so I can understand the effect of being drawn to what the client wants and where you ened to be. Probably manageable short term (to get the experience I'd need), before looking for something more stationary.

The client staff universally feared and hated MCs in equal measures, and for good reason.

Have heard them described as seaguls - squawk, sh-t everywhere and flap off....

My interest would be less like that - TBH I'd happily find myself somewhere smaller, with a view then to doing more like what the teaboy does.

A Partner at Accenture said to me 'nobody gives a s**t about your career except you, so take responsibility and manage it'.

Good advice I reckon: If you don't actively manage it, you can get sucked into all sorts of rubbish. I left ACN to do stuff that was more suited to me but the time I served was definitely a good investment.

Robert Townsend wrote a book a few years ago....
"CONSULTANTS: REAL MANAGERS DON'T NEED THEM
All a consultant says is: "I spent some time with your people; here's what they told me and here's what I suggest you do about it."
A real manager spends time with his people and [i]knows[/i] what to do or how to find out. If he isn't always working with his people to improve the operation, he's not a real manager.
If you need a consultant to tell you what to do or how to find out, then [i]you're[/i] the problem.
If all that's true, then why are there so many busy consultants?
Because there are so many incompetent CEOs.
I don't know why so many lawyers and accountants get to the top slot, but they do, and it's been my experience that many of them are more comfortable with their financial reports, their budgets, their assistants-to, and their plans than are with their people.
To the extent that's true, they're incompetent as leaders.
This is when the consultant is called in to serve the CEO's important function of "management by wandering around".
In my opinion, the number and activity of consultants are a direct measure of the trouble in our board rooms. Until we flush the toilet of top management a few more times - get the incompetents (including the lawyers and accountants) [i]out[/i] andsome operating people [i]in[/i] - we'll be missing the fun and profit we should expect from our working lives."

[i]Further Up The Organisation[/i] by Robert Townsend

We just hired a MC to sort our IT.

Step 1 - he fires the current IT manager
Step 2 - he hires a new IT manager

Great you think, only all our systems are Linux and he fired the Linux IT guy and replaced him with a Windoze only guy.

We now pay two very big salaries and to two guys who have to beg our developers to help them open a bash window and run a backup.

They then tried to build a new fileserver using windows server to replace our excellent Linux Samba server. After 3 days they finally realised that Windows server 2008 has a max RAID size of 2 TB and our Linux box is about 20...

I could go on.... Office Wifi has been down for weeks etc

But the company still pays the MC through the nose as our systems slowly disintegrate but I have to confess that his PPT slides have a very nice font and that appears to be all that matters....

get the incompetents (including the lawyers and accountants) out andsome operating people in - we'll be missing the fun and profit we should expect from our working lives.

Lawyers generally make poor leaders. This is because their training is highly technical and prevents them from making decisions. There are massive problems with this.

Accountants have come to run everything. Businesses are so beholden to the idea that they need to make their figures look as good as possible - whether privately owned or, worse, public companies - accountants are seen as the way to achieve this.

It's an interesting suggestion, though to me what it really smacks of is a JFDI culture. You know the one "If I have to explain it, I won't bother. I'll tell you to just f---ing do it." That's also a poor form of management, as it tends to be reactive and not forward thinking.

But, thanks for sharing. I'll get a copy and have a wider read.

Good advice I reckon: If you don't actively manage it, you can get sucked into all sorts of rubbish.

For me, I'm coming to the realisation that, while I have legal skills, the most tedious aspect of my job is marking up and negotiating contracts. What I'm more interested in is what doing the transaction/deal gives people. What the goal is. Being involved in helping at that level is way more interesting.

So, I figured that something that might push my career more that way would be worth looking at.

Cheers

We now pay two very big salaries and to two guys who have to beg our developers to help them open a bash window and run a backup.

Seems to be a symptom of what Macavity's quote is getting at: poor decision making to get the wrong person through the door to help out.

Besides, not the sort of consulting I'd be into....

I worked for Accidenture for a few years. I quite enjoyed it, but I quite like IT and drinking free beer 🙂

Lawyers generally make poor leaders. This is because their training is highly technical and prevents them from making decisions. There are massive problems with this.

+1

Have seen this in own experience and point was also made on a number of my MBA courses, something about Lawyers not really being team players and too black and white

"CONSULTANTS: REAL MANAGERS DON'T NEED THEM

This thread has highlighted how very different I am to a lot of folk on here.

Thats not a criticism BTW, merely an observation.

[i]Accountants have come to run everything[/i]

Boy is this become true, everywhere...

I'm currently working on a large programme (excess of £500m), and its headed by an accountant with a smattering of accountants in the key roles. Of course supported by a range of consultants, contractors (me included) and SI's. Their inability to lead (and manage) has to be seen to be believed.

I think the key problem is that their training (and the companies they start with, like PWC etc) makes them believe that they can do anything.

I work for a large management consultancy, specialising in HR
Less squawking and shitting as said above at my place - more hand holding, knowledge transfer and working in partnership with clients
Pay is ok, work life balance is good (relatively)
There's a lot of superficial support from the company but in practice you're on your own

CONSULTANTS: REAL MANAGERS DON'T NEED THEM

Sadly, there's a lack of decent managers in the world from my experience.

in my experience, consultants are brought in where clients:
- don't have the time and resources to do the work themselves
- require an independent viewpoint and advice either for regulatory reasons or to give confidence to senior management
- need something done quickly
- want to transfer accountability to someone else
- are clueless...

- are clueless...

+1000000000000

Whay vdubber said - and brakes as well.

I'm a Partner in a Big4 and absolutely love how everyone wants to hate the concept of it but secretly wonders what it is like.

Having been and done on both sides of the fence consultants can be useful if you know why you need them. The bigger the programme the bigger the sh1t spouted and by god do i referee some of that. My observation having come back from 8 years building (and selling) companies is the tolerance to 'old style' MC is very low.

Is Geoff Burch a management consultant?

"I work for a large management consultancy, specialising in HR"

HR - that's another waste of space...

footflaps - Member

They then tried to build a new fileserver using windows server to replace our excellent Linux Samba server. After 3 days they finally realised that Windows server 2008 has a max RAID size of 2 TB and our Linux box is about 20...

OK I'm going off-topic but this is garbage. Are you talking about partition sizes or RAID array sizes? If the latter then any limitation will be the RAID vendor (or you're using very small cluster sizes or SCSI r10/w10), I'm assuming you aren't actually talking about using software RAID for a 20TB file server though... As for Windows partition sizes then that's what GPT is for and will handle 256TB/16EB depending on what you're doing.

HR - that's another waste of space...

that's why you need HR consultants!

Wow,the crazy world of made-up jobs....

IME Bain and McKinsey people are excellent.

ACN for four years and worked at others as consultant too.

Thing is, consultants are brought in to make the change, deliver, get out.. Companies can do that too, but why would they be employing their staff to do that? Surely the staff are 100% busy with doing their day jobs for the company.

Don't like the perception of consultants preaching - but they have experience of seeing elsewhere (competitors) what works and what doesn't. So don't dismiss that, and they do generally listen and act on what the client staff know and do. They get measured on success - so it does help to keep people happy and not piss them off.

@teaboy - where, and with whom are you working now?

Nobody ever says "Thank goodness the Management Consultants have arrived"

I went for an interview with McKinsey in the late 90s, but withdrew my application when I realised that they were after recently qualified MBAs who wanted to work 80+ hours per week, not me on either count.