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