Be advised - How to use consulting effectively

No more. Today, clients rightly expect more for their money. They're not just looking for "thinkers" but "doers", people who can deliver measurable value and tangible results. People with real knowledge of different markets and cultures, and a global set of skills. Consultants have always needed relevant practical experience and innovative ideas, but today they also need to demonstrate a wider and more intimate understanding of the complex relationships between business processes, people and technology. From initial ideas, to managing operational improvements using IT, through to the final delivery and beyond.

In this book, we take a fresh look at the client-consultant relationship from both sides of the table. It features contributors from across Europe, exploring the unique expectations and practices in different markets and their best-kept secrets for getting the most from your business consulting partnerships.

Whatever type of organisation you work in, wherever you fit in its organisational structure, the people around you expect more from you than ever before. Your shareholders want better returns; your colleagues expect you to do the impossible; your employees look to you to set priorities and clear the way through the morass of everyday work in order to achieve what is important, not just what is urgent.

After decades in which organisations have sought to minimise their costs, the recent recession has taught us that, whatever costs you have cut, these will never be enough. Now, the still tentative economic recovery is teaching us that organisations have to deliver still more, of higher quality and with greater responsiveness, without allowing their costs to creep back up.

Management consultants play a crucial role, and one that has been steadily increasing over the last 20 years, as organisations become clearer about the functions and activities which are central to their long-term existence, in which they need to excel, and those which are required for only short periods of often intense activity. Consultants help clients in three fundamental ways. First and foremost, they provide specialist skills which can be crucial to a particular project or initiative but which are in scarce supply