The consulting industry can be vertically divided into three levels, namely, information consulting industry, management consulting industry and strategic consulting industry. At each level, it can also be subdivided horizontally.
Information consulting industry is the basic layer of consulting industry. Mainly engaged in market information investigation, collection, collation and analysis business, to provide accurate and perfect auxiliary information for enterprise decision-making.
Management consulting industry is the core of consulting industry. Including: investment consulting business, mainly engaged in investment feasibility analysis and project demonstration. Modern famous consulting companies include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch; Human resource consultation mainly focuses on human resource management of enterprises, such as business process reengineering, salary system design, basic management system construction, human resource development training and so on. Marketing consulting business mainly designs or evaluates various marketing strategies and marketing organization systems of enterprises, and also organizes marketing training; Financial accounting consulting, mainly providing consulting services for enterprises in accounting, auditing, asset evaluation and taxation; Management information consultation is an all-round systematic reform of enterprise management. The most famous consulting companies in this field are the management consulting department of AXA and the top five international accounting companies.
Strategic consulting industry is the highest level of consulting industry. It mainly provides strategic design, competitive strategy, business field analysis and planning and design services for enterprises, and also provides policy decisions for the government. Because of the high employment risk, there are fewer specialized companies.
2. How to evaluate management consulting?
Different consulting companies have their own project management methods. How to evaluate the workload of each member of the project team in the management consulting project; How to determine everyone's different contributions at the same time; How to evaluate whether a person's working speed is fast or slow in a specific job?
1) First of all, we encourage teamwork so that every member of the project team can give full play to their strengths and help each other.
2) We involve all project members in formulating the project action plan, and determine the division of labor and the time required for each step. However, during the implementation of the project, due to various unpredictable reasons, the action plan may need to be adjusted. Sometimes the project team even needs to work overtime in order to finish the task on time.
3) In addition to the workload and speed mentioned in your question, the factors we should consider in the process of managing consulting projects are more important, including quality, results and customer satisfaction.
4) Most importantly, I think a consulting company should try its best to boost staff morale, encourage staff to improve themselves and provide the best and most effective service to customers wholeheartedly. In such a cultural atmosphere, consultants can manage themselves and be truly professional.
The following is an analysis of three issues in management consulting:
A. How to evaluate the workload of each member of the project team in the management consulting project?
The method we usually adopt is to make a project action plan first, so that all members can participate in deciding who will do what, when to finish it, and what they think other members' abilities are. The consultants involved in the project first put forward their own opinions, and then all members made a decision together. Another way is that the project team leader can make an action plan based on past experience and the consultant's ability, and then adjust and modify it according to the opinions and suggestions of other members.
B. how to determine everyone's different contributions at the same time?
The performance of each member can be evaluated in many ways:
1] speed.
2] quality.
3] Results (improvement results of the customer company and customer satisfaction).
C. how to evaluate whether a person is fast or slow in specific work?
Speed is an aspect of performance appraisal, which can be evaluated according to whether the task is completed on time. It is important that the consultant's speed does not affect the progress of the whole project. If there is any difficulty, it must be raised in advance and solved by all project team members. Once the project plan is finalized, the consultant needs to complete it as planned, and other important evaluation criteria include quality and results.
3. The core competitiveness of China management consulting industry.
Management consulting industry belongs to the tertiary industry, and its development is accompanied by the rise of a generation of private enterprises in China. The output of management theory and the introduction of business common sense are the essence of most management consulting needs in the early stage. Politicization of enterprises and lack of qualified professional managers are the prerequisites for consultants to be valuable. And this customer base is changing: with the maturity of various industries, the competitive pattern has basically formed, creating a large number of large enterprises, and their operations are becoming more and more standardized. The professional managers they use are more and more homogeneous with the consultant groups in source and quality, and even in a sense, the quality of the consultant groups who have entered the industry in recent years is generally lower than that of professional managers. It should be said that those enterprises that grew up with the first generation of consultants have greatly exceeded the strength of domestic consulting companies in their demand for enterprise problem solving. Domestic consulting companies can only serve as resources and services for corporate clients in terms of creativity, advertising, promotion, skills and training, while the management level of corporate clients, the depth and accuracy of problem solving have exceeded the ability of most consultants.
After a period of experience in consulting project management, many consulting organizations have realized that this industry is full of challenges and difficulties, with both opportunities and foundations. It can't tolerate any falsehood. What it needs is expert knowledge and professionalism, broad vision and rigorous analysis. We can boil it down to information power, logic power and innovation power, which have made consulting myths of giants such as McKinsey, Kearney, roland berger and Accenture.
On the other hand, it is an indisputable fact that the global information capability gap exists in local management consulting companies. In terms of local information capacity, knowledge management and data management are generally backward. A large number of consulting companies estimate that partners can browse past cases, and they are not allowed to keep opening computer networks and unplugging the interfaces of mobile access devices to prevent information leakage.
Look at logic again. Logical power refers to management ideas and system implementation tools. Western enterprise management thought is formed in the long-term market economy environment with the continuous growth of enterprises. Looking closely at the growth of western enterprises and the evolution of enterprise management thought, from the linear departmental system in the 1900 s to the general mobile practice theory and business division system in the 1920 s, from point industrial thinking, strategic thinking, organizational thinking, human resources and corporate culture to the balanced scorecard with systematic thinking, modern management thought was born only a hundred years ago, and it is still in a state of blooming and contending. Anyone with enterprise awareness and practical experience in enterprise management knows that it is meaningless to talk about management, but the actual effect is the last word. Management is about people, and people live in society. Therefore, enterprise management thought must be rooted in the systematic thought of local culture. China's local culture is profound and has a unique global system view. The birth of China's management thought and management tool system is a historical necessity.
At the beginning of the reform and opening up, the whole people worshiped foreign things and lacked management experience. Multinational consulting companies and some westernized local consulting companies could really win a temporary market simply by copying western management ideas and tools, but in the final analysis, innovating China's management ideas and tools is the last word.
The formation of management thought and the improvement of management tool system cannot be achieved overnight. It is definitely a common sense mistake to simply despise the integrity and logic of western management thought and management tool system.
Therefore, logically speaking, multinational consulting companies do have their own uniqueness. Local consulting firms tend to be divided in logic. One kind is called "academic school", which is actually a complete westernization school. A group of poor unarmed MBA scholars regard western management tools as classics and know them by heart, based on homogeneous competition with multinational consulting companies, especially in consulting fields that do not require global information capabilities, which reduces customer expectations. The promotion of customer management reform has become the "labor outsourcing" of customers, and the company has become a report production line, lacking independent thinking. This local consulting company has no real room for development. Another kind of local consulting company, although it has original system management ideas, lacks sophisticated products and logically consistent tool systems, and is only better than traditional Chinese medicine, and faces great difficulties in product system construction.
Finally, look at the transformational power, which is the first of the three core competencies of consulting companies. Multinational consulting companies have always been known for their innovation. When they first entered China, they also practiced the tradition of "major surgery". Furthermore, the core of innovation is innovation ability and innovation promotion ability. Innovation ability can not be separated from a deep understanding of the internal and external environment of enterprises. Although multinational consulting companies have a large number of local employees, they often fail to see the environment in the creative process, and even if they do, they often disagree, so creativity is often outrageous. On the other hand, in the process of promoting the change, the complex internal ecology of China enterprises is often neglected, which leads to the change based on its own brand strength, which is rushed and met with the tenacious resistance of the losers, and finally comes to nothing.
Although the brand of local consulting companies is weak, they have a stage to show their talents in innovation, but then again, if local consulting companies want to really innovate, they must have a deep understanding and unremitting pursuit of consulting value. In this regard, the consulting company selling the report pursues the input-output ratio, emphasizing fast-forward and fast-out, and can do nothing; The savage companies on the self-employed platform are mixed, and their personal abilities are capped, so it is difficult to become a climate. At present, China can vaguely see several customer value-oriented consulting companies, but in a harsh living environment, once the business volume expands rapidly, few companies can resist the temptation to make quick money.