consultants...

Dilbert presents Dogbert the consultant !

check here ...

It is hilarious !

paulson generates business for consulting firms

Henry Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, will create huge business opportunity for consulting firms with his proposed regulation. It's the broadest reform of oversight in the financial markets since the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Businesses are amenable to the same as it will streamline the regulation to avoid such fiascos such as Bear Sterns. It will result in reduced profits but will reduce risk of persecution later.

This regulation translates into a huge opportunity for the consulting firms because both the Fed as well as the commercial sector will have a run for becoming ready for the new era! Consulting firms will flash their accelerators to get the business. As time will be of importance, the billing rates will be at a premium.

infy and the art of PR!

At 5.30 am, while working out at the gym, I saw few frequent Infosys ads on CNBC and I thought that it does merit a blog here.

Infy has relentlessly worked towards branding efforts - more than any other Indian service provider. The vision that the top management has is way ahead of its peers. No wonder their media hits are way higher than its peers in the Indian service provider business.

What drove them towards this obsession with branding?

Vision:
NRN's vision as conveyed to me by their Healthcare and Lifesciences chief during a campus presentation at CMU indicated that Infy wants to leverage its deep expertise that it develops at the grassroot levels in order to deliver business solutions. Also, I could practically experience this at one of our client engagements, where the management consultants who were brought in could not provide the most optimal solution due to lack of grassroot level knowledge. Most of them suffered lack of depth.

If one has good contextual knowledge for a client then one can provide a better solution -- there's no doubt about that. This is more relevant to complex transformations than simple best practices implementations for simple transformations.

Pressure to upsell:
In the GDM or Global Delivery Model, the revenues were primarily in USD and the costs were primarily in INR. With weakness in USD against INR, there is a huge pressure on their margins. This is forcing them to upsell.

Timing is right:
The timing of ads is right - with slowdown, US businesses will require more and more of outsourcing. The businesses cannot hold on to costly US-based resources if they want to stay competitive.

Lessons learnt:

Competing on price is not the silver bullet -
This reminds me of our lecture in International business by ex-chief economist of Gulf Oil (bought by Chevron in 1984). Sustainable business requires that one must compete on the quality and not on price. This came up during the Matsushita US market-entry strategy for a specific product.

Perception issues -
No matter what high-end services are delivered by Infy, they suffered from perception issue of being "cheap" or "inexpensive". Upselling the services is difficult once this happens. I remember doing a high end work that is delivered by some of the snobbish consulting firms and charged at 5-6 times.

Manage the forex actively-
Sound International finance principles need to be deployed if you want to be a true "global player." Infy lacked in this aspect. I remember the conversations I used to have with one of our Group Manager - Infy doesn't know how to handle forex and he used to have a popular perception that - ah, they are such a large firm, they must be having experts in place. Hell no! They didn't have experts until 07 in place. This was especially true with USD tanking more than 20% against INR in less than a year. Global players such as Merck have much more complex strategies in place for forex management. If Infy wants to become a true global player, they will have to increase the sophistication to mitigate this risk!

consultants and recommendations

Dilbert had a neatly outlined strip on recommendations. A software is recommended against and still gets installed causing it to be a DoA! You can check the strip here.

After checking out the strip, a few questions that linger reader's mind are :

1. How to make persuasive recommendations?
2. How to prevent political agendas from derailing your recommendations?
3. Do recommendations become negotiations? If yes, how do we negotiate?
   

Recommendations can become negotiations depending on the situation (the ones who get recommended, the ones who recommend, the political agendas of different stakeholders, etc). Consultants in advisory capacity always face such situations where the recommendations can become negotiations.

Consulting is an art and not a science. As Dr. Young taught us the psychology of audience decision making in his course on Consulting and Conflict Resolution, I recall a few of the prime points are as follows:

• Insist on using objective criteria. For instance, in case of software architecture negotiations, a good method to use is ATAM or Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method
• Focus on interests and not positions. Use data to back your interest - it could be industry reports from authoritative sources such as Gartner, Forrester, etc
  
• Like it or not, negotiation is a fact of life
• In negotiations, neither be too hard nor be too soft - use principled negotiation to get what you entitle and be good to people as well
  
• Separate people from the problem
• Invent options for mutual gains
• Use BATNA for folks who are more powerful
  
• Use negotiation jujitsu for difficult folks with dirty tricks

All of the above points are important and they work if practiced the right way. I have experienced it and recommend it to every reader of this blog.

Happy Consulting !

booz allen to break up !

Check out this news here.
BAH to break up and have its consultancy services separate ! BAH generates about USD 4bn a year revenue. Given this, the firm's conservative valuations will be easily in the ball park of USD 50 bn+. The partners will have a ball in case this deal goes through.

I am trying to gauge what will Carlyle gain if they get control of these assets (which in absolute terms are - NONE! - most of the assets are intangibles). The people may or may not stick out with BAH - given the turmoil that BAH consulting will undergo with new paymasters in form of Carlyle. Also, as partnership targets of sr managers and managers will get hazed out - there may be a certain degree of attrition to face.

Having said that, Carlyle can deploy the staff and the managers in private equity related work. Their existing assets can be used for it. However, what impact they can bring is a suspect as 70% of BAH's consulting division works for the government and the dynamics in that sphere are much different than commercial sector (critical success factors are more political than merit-based).

I am not sure if this will affect BAH Consulting's ability to attract good talent from b-schools !? Time will tell...

FAA stats and flight delays

Consulting teaches you one thing for sure - how to be smart about your travel. Be it filling up of bags in a smart way or be it checking out for flights in smart ways.

For a naive user, flightstats.com is good enough. However, someone wanting further information, can drill down at the FAA site here. Ground stops at your destination indicate that you are now going to have your flight out in that time period. In such cases, call the airlines you are flying with to confirm if you should reach the airport or not.

You can also sign up individual air carriers' notifications which can email and/or text you about it. However, if you are following the FAA method above, then you would find this providing information with a lag.

for all aspiring consultants

http://www.gettingdrunkinfirstclass.com/

This is a fairly hardcore site written by a consultant while exhibiting his feelings about the profession. I have no comments about the same.

Future of IT consulting

This article from HBS on "Future of IT Consulting" was something worth going through:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/3402.html

On a side note, I am trying to catch up with my reading, as I get settled with my new job and the new place where I've relocated myself.

One of the interesting notes which I already experience in the market-place is:

Many CIOs say they will do less outsourcing in the future. This is driven by several factors, including a decrease in the number of new, "gorilla" ERP and CRM initiatives and the increasing need for rapid and flexible modifications to existing systems. What they do outsource will be the "body shop" activity when they need more capacity, but they plan to keep the deeper expertise in their companies.

The companies having intensive IT functions want to keep outsourcing to
Where will the IT consulting arms of the Big Four in audit go from here?

a. The headcount-increment predictions are flattening out, as seen from their projections for the next year.

b. Most of the functions performed by the consulting arms of the Big Four are geared towards the above mentioned "body-shop" activities. For instance, if you look at the IT consulting arm of a leading Big Four firm, it has huge chunk of ppl (more than 50%) devoted in their Systems Dev arm and barely, a few in their IT Strategic Management arm.


What do I suggest for my regular readers?

One must work towards developing one's own skill-sets. Do not go behind the names of the companies. Within those companies as well, you are evaluated based on the work you've done in the past and the work you are doing now. Thus, one must remain highly selective in the work one does. You will automatically be picked up by one of these firms, if you are working in a niche area as an expert. I say this because they want ppl as they are operating (20%) far above their healthy attrition levels (which are 12-13%).

Also, it makes logical sense to load up one's skills at one's own consent than what the firm's want. Most of the body-shops want only one skill - working hard on whatever you are put onto. Thus, specialization is only a matter of chance and not a pre-meditated, strategic play. As Ayn Rand puts it: "Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think."

Consulting firms on campus ... McKinsey, Deloitte, etc

McKinsey came in for the APD positions for BTO and Deloitte came in for their Technology Integration division's information sessions targeted towards MISM program.

Absolutely delightful time !

Alums had come in for the session with McK and interns discussed their experience during the Delloite session.

Got to know quite a few things during both the information sessions.

Now, the count down has begun..because both the applications are fairly complex and need to be done strategically!