What does a consultant do?

What does a consultant do?
It seems unbelievable to describe a single process for heterogeneous consultancy services in management, but there is. All management consultants follow same five stages procedure in delivering services to their clients.

1. Entry: In this stage first of all consultants experience primitive contact with their clients that has significant role in consulting project since during it they can gain valuable information about customers' problem/opportunity to offer appropriate and acceptable proposal to them. Consultants should have enough preparation before meeting with their clients to be able to go right on the point. Don't forget that signing contract is result of successful entry phase.

2. Diagnosis: In this stage consultants have to analyze purpose and problem in depth in cooperation with their clients. Consequently, they should try to gather fact as much as possible. Remember that consultants just need relevant data and facts to the defined situation in the first and second stage. After gathering facts, consultants should analyze them and give feedback to their clients to check findings with them.

3. Action Planning: In third stage, consultants should try to generate solutions for their customer according to purpose, collected information, and their tacit knowledge and experiences. Then, they should evaluate these alternatives and propose best options to their clients. Consultants also should prepare an implementation plan for selected solutions in this stage.

4. Implementation: In this step, consultants have no executive role unless it was declared in their contracts. They usually assist their clients to get the job done and fix any possible problem in their proposal to improve it toward successful implementation. They, moreover, provide necessary training for their customers to empower them in implementing devised solution.

5. Termination: The last but not the least step is termination. In this step, consultants evaluate results of implemented solution to find any possible deviation from final objectives and take corrective actions. Then they prepare final report to show the process and results of their actions to their clients and reach to mutual commitment with them. Finally, consultants may try to offer future contracts to their customers according to possible problems or opportunities that they have found during their project.

Refrence: Management Consulting - A guide to the profession
Edited by: Milan Kubr

Outsourcing

International business is one of the interesting courses that each MBA student should pass. Our instructor in this course was Dr. Mo Yamin, a very nice guy from Manchester Business School, one of the best business schools all around the world. He assigned us a project to review outsourcing as one of the significant trends in strategies of MNEs (Multinational Enterprises) through a case.
My teammate and me as team A, had decided to go more generally for reasons and challenges of outsourcing, and also provide some mini cases in interesting parts. Here is a brief review of our report:
Through studying many mini cases and literatures, we had found that there are many reasons for MNEs to outsource some parts of their activities. The most important benefits were cost reduction that comes from lower cost of production factors in various places, flexibility that comes from ability to change level of production with no significant cost or investment in response to changing demand, better quality as a result of experience of outsourcee in special field, and focusing on core business due to transferring none-core activities to an external party and making resource free.
But firms should pay attention to the challenges of outsourcing. Psychic distance among different countries, time differences, conflicting objectives, matter of security, intellectual property, controlling quality, and so many other factors should be considered during these kinds of projects.
It's generally suggested that firms outsource non-core activities to keep their competitive advantages and know-how, but they should pay attention to their brand name as an umbrella on all their internal and external activities.
We had found many success and failure cases. If you want know more about these cases and complete results of our project don't hesitate to contact me through my mail.

Amin from Team A

HRIS form System Group

Today, I was attending in a meeting with a guy from System Group about SG's new Human Resource Information System (HRIS). It was a software based on .net and it seems that designers had considered every possible action that a human resource expert may want to do by use of a HRIS. This software consists of thirteen modules. Some of the important components are Recruitment, Performance Appraisal, and Organizational structure. I believe that it really can solve many existing problems in Iranian organization and help them to use their data and create procedures to increase performance.

But remember that this software need exact and appropriate inputs from human resource experts such as Job Description and Job Specification, appraisal forms, and training evaluation forms.

I highly recommend all MBA students to experience this software in SG.