These are exciting but challenging times for consulting. Gone are days of smart people giving advice. Clients today want solutions that provide new positive and secure digital experiences for their customers, employees and suppliers. In an environment where new entrants without legacy assets are capitalizing on new technologies to leapfrog established market participants, incumbents are looking to consultants for solutions to become more innovative and responsive to changing customer needs driven by disruptive technologies, all while maintaining their existing businesses.
While company management teams may have the desire and even the mandate for change, they often lack the leadership skills, resources, technical knowledge and supporting culture to translate ambiguous objectives like "we need to be more innovative" into a concrete vision and plan to move forward.
Companies are looking to partner with consultants to lead, inspire, coach and support innovation in developing solutions that ensure their products, operations and business models remain competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace. As a result, the business of consulting is evolving into client partnerships in developing and delivering solutions that embrace new technology and the analytical methods they enable to drive measurable positive outcomes.
Solution-driven consulting necessitates a radical change in engagement models. New models include the adoption of creative physical spaces, ecosystems of trusted partners and a broader, multi-disciplinary approach to engaging with client in conceiving, creating and delivering new products, services and solutions.
Consulting client engagement models include:
Co-Development—Firms are investing in creative offsite physical spaces where they can bring together multiple perspectives and capabilities to support clients through their innovation journey from ideation to market launch and scaling of new products, services or solutions. Off sites create a safe environment to bring together the right combination of expertise at the right time to move projects forward using a multi-disciplinary approach that, for example, offers customer insights to determine valued features, design thinking to ensure inclusion of valued features into prototypes, and agile methods to iteratively test new concepts and designs.
Orchestration of Partner Ecosystems—While service providers aspire to do it all, no firm, no matter how large, has the full breadth and depth of capabilities to go it alone. They are best off in focusing on what they do best internally and be able to call on an external ecosystem of trusted partners for best of breed technical expertise or solutions. Consultants are increasingly taking on an orchestration or matchmaking role, sitting between their knowledge of clients' business needs and vendor capabilities and solutions. Preexisting partner relationships with pre-negotiated ways of working help to avoid common pitfalls and accelerate solution development and delivery in an environment where companies place a premium on speed to market.
Co-investment—While consultants typically work solely on behalf of the client who ultimately pays for and own developed solutions, it is increasingly common for firms to combine resources and share the risk and reward of new co-developed solutions with their clients. With skin in the game, consultants typically take on a more active role in decision-making and retain rights to the underlying intellectual property.
Start-up incubation—Combing their knowledge of emerging business issues and technologies, many consulting firms are active in identifying and supporting start-up companies that address white space opportunities. Support may derive from funding, physical space, advice and expertise but also access to their client networks to channel activities toward high-value opportunities and scale solutions toward independent commercial viability.
Platform solutions—With little desire to recreate the wheel, many firms are standardizing their toolbox of developed industry- and functional-specific solutions on a common technology platform. Go-to-market strategies now often lead with pre-or semi-configured solutions to common business issues to win business and accelerate time to outcome realization. Product managers work alongside client engagement partners to identify opportunities and sell solutions outright or through managed service agreements that necessitate the hiring and training of ongoing product support staff.
Naima Hoque Essing, ALM Intelligence Management Consulting Research
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