Management consulting is the practice of assisting companies to enhance their performance. Organizations may draw upon management consultants’ services for arious reasons, including gaining external (and presumably objective) advice and access to consultants’ specialized expertise.
As a consequence of our exposure to, and association with many organizations, consulting firms are typically conscious of industry “best practices”. However, the precise nature of situations may limit the power or appropriateness of transferring such practices from one organization to a different one. Consultancies may yield organizational change management assistance, development of coaching skills, process analysis, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services. In addition, management consultants often bring their proprietary methodologies or frameworks to guide the identification of problems and function the idea for recommendations with a view to simpler or efficient ways of performing work tasks.
Function
The functions of consulting services are often broken down into eight task categories. Consultants can function as bridges for facts and knowledge, and that external consultants can yield these bridging services more inexpensively than client firms themselves. Consultants can be engaged proactively without significant external enforcement and reactively with external pressure. Proactive consultant engagement is mainly involved in finding hidden weak spots and improving performance, while reactive consultant engagement is primarily aimed at solving problems identified by external stakeholders.
Consultants have particular expertise on tasks that would include high internal coordination costs for clients, such as organization-wide changes or the application of information technology. In addition, their focus and experience in gathering information worldwide and across industries renders their information search less costly than for clients because of economies of scale.
Management consulting firms
Since management consulting symbolizes over half of the consulting industry, most players in the market are either specialized management consultancy firms or organizations with a business unit that offers management consulting services. The latter case primarily concerns large IT service providers, recruitment firms, or temporary employment agencies. In addition, in terms of numbers, a large part of the market consists of freelancers- freelance management consultants who are active as individualistic advisors or contractors.
What are management consulting services?
At AJSH, we assist our clients in strategic planning, succession planning, organizational development, organizational change management, facilitation and much more. If you have any questions or wish to know more about management consulting, kindly contact us.