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Acctg 15 - Final Lesson
Acctg 15 - Final Lesson
PROFESSIONAL ATTRIBUTES
OF MANAGEMENT
CONSULTANTS
I. Technical skills
These include personal attributes that make an individual amiable among people and
effective in accomplishing desirable objectives trough people.
These involve the ability to understand and use the following approach in solving
business problems:
DISCUSSION:
I. Technical Skills
Education Requirements
The education required to obtain the necessary technical skills for management
consulting depends on the area of specialization. Some generalizations can be made,
however, concerning the amount of education required, the common core requirement
and experience possessed by most consultants.
A. TECHNICAL TRAINING
a) Length of Education
A bachelor’s degree is a perquisite and many, if not most people going into
management consultancy today have one or two graduate degrees. Undergraduate
programs generally teach the “how” for the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in
business problems.
b) Type of Education
Educational programs usually include a technical degree and a general degree. For
instance, a person might obtain a general business degree at a bachelor’s level and
specialize in information technology after earning a master’s degree in computer
science and information management.
1. Communications
2. Mathematics an statistics
3. Computer data processing
In addition to education and experience, several personal attributes are critical for the
success of a management consultant. These are:
This refers to the consultant’s degree of mental organization and development that
enables him/her to absorb and relate facts in a logical and orderly fashion and to
reason inductively and deductively.
2. Integrity
This pertains to the number of attributes, such as moral and ethical soundness;
fairness; equity; ability to distinguish between right and wrong; honesty;
dependability; freedom from corrupting influence or practice; and strictness in the
fulfillment of both the letter and the spirit of agreements made regardless of
personal considerations.
3. Objectivity
The consultancy must have the ability to grasp and to represent facts, unbiased by
prejudice. He/ She is also independent.
4. Understanding of people (human relations; empathy)
The consultant must have the ability to anticipate human reactions to differing
situations; to establish and maintain friendly relations and mutual confidence with
people at all levels; and to recognize and respect the rights of others.
5. Judgment
This refers to the management consultant’s ability and reasoning power to arrive
at a wise decision, a course of action or a conclusion, especially when only
meager or confused facts are available.
6. Courage
This refers to the consultant’s strength of mind and character that enables him/her
to encounter disagreement, difficulties, and obstructions with firmness of spirit
and determination, and to consider them as challenges rather than something to be
avoided or feared; the ability to stand by one’s convictions regardless of pressure.
7. Ambition
A management consultant must have the desire and motivation to earn and obtain
full recognition for the attainment of professional status.
8. Psychological maturity
9. Physiological equilibrium
A consultant has most impact when he or she talks the same language as
the client. Ideas must be related in a way that is succinct and precise and
uses no more technical jargon than the client is comfortable with.
Converting technical ideas into plain language is not always easy. But it is
important and is a skill of its own which can develop with practice.
Of course, ideas must have some substance if they are to deliver real
value. Communication of ideas must be backed up with information. This
includes both facts and interpretation of facts. The logic of that
interpretation must be clear. Different people in the client business will
seek and will be convinced by different corroborating information, at
different levels and presented in different ways. Some information will be
included in an initial communication. Other parts may be kept back as a
response to questions and challenges.
The consultant can draw on a variety of formal selling skills. These must
be used appropriately though. Consultancy, as a ‘product’ does not usually
respond to a ‘hard sell’ approach. Rather, a formal selling approach should
be used as the tactic in a well-thought-through selling strategy. This
strategy should aim to communicate what the consultant can genuinely
offer the client and be used to build a long-term, mutually rewarding
relationship.
Good team working is essential for business success and not just in
consulting. It is a skill in itself. It demands many things. It requires, for
example, a careful definition of individual roles in relation to the tea as a
whole. It also requires well-honed interpersonal, motivation and conflict-
resolution skills. Most of all, perhaps, it demands a willingness to align the
interests of the individuals who make up the team with the overall task the
team must address. This requires an ability to advocate individual interests
and yet, when necessary, to compromise individual concerns for the
interests of the group as a whole.
You will find that with a little practice active listening, far from detracting
from your ability to prepare responses, positively enhances it, not least
because your responses will be relevant to the other speaker.
It should not ne that a consulting team can have only one, permanent lead
and that remainder of the team must be followers. Such an assumption lies
behind many intragroup conflicts. Leadership is not an inherent and fixed
property of an individual. It is situational; that is, it arises out of the
conditions of a particular situation in which people interact in a particular
way. Leadership may shift between members as the project evolves and the
situation changes. The individual who shows leadership for the team may not
be the same person who shows leadership towards the client business or
towards people from outside the team offering support to the project. In
professional consulting, as in business generally, leadership up the formal
reporting hierarchy, from subordinate to superior, may be as important as
traditional leadership down it.
The following are the most common barriers and the recommended approach that may be
adopted by the consultant to avoid or correct them:
It is very likely that the consultant will encounter an individual who is a “know-it-
all” and anything the consultant says will be probably rejected by this person. The
consultant should try to develop as cooperative and supportive climate and should
approach the person from his or her own perspective. Use well-though-out and
logical reasoning that leads up to a particular action. Disagree, if necessary, bur
do not denounce overtly the position of the individual to improve any future
working relationship with him or her.
This may arise when the consultant interacts with a nonexpert client and
employees who are unable to understand technical language.
The consultant should exercise care when using words that may be misunderstood
by the receiver and seek immediate feedback when necessary in order to ensure
that the meaning the receiver gives to a technical word is what intended by the
sender.
4. Resistance to change
5. Information overload
Any individual has a limit when dealing with information and exceeding this limit
can hamper effective communication of information. Try to guide clients by
helping them manage their time, set priorities and delegate works responsibilities
to others. If an individual, for the moment, appears to be overloaded with work,
try not to give additional assignment to him/her. An idea may be rejected no
matter how ingenious it is. Exercise good judgment and timing when confronted
with this situation.
An objectives state what the project is going to achieve for the client.
However, not every statement is a good objective. A stated objected must be
subject to a critical review. Is it well defined? Will the organization know
when it has achieved the objective? Is the objective achievable, given the
external market conditions that face the business? It is realistic, given the
business’s internal resources?
A project in which tasks order and priority have been well defined will be
delivered in a shorter time period and at lower cost than one where they have not.
All management activity demands that money be spent. Keeping track of that
expenditure is critical management responsibility. Profiles of expected
expenditure – budgets – must be set before the project starts so that the resource
requirements may be understood. These budgets must be managed. Actual
expenditure must be monitored against anticipated expenditure. A project, no
matter how good its outcomes, runs the risk of disappointing the client if it turns
out to be more expensive than anticipated.
Productive team working is crucial success. One area where team working and
project management skills meet is in deciding who will do what. Not every
member of the team can or should attempt to undertake every task. It is unlikely,
given people’s individual preferences that they would wish to. A lot of value can
be created by differentiation activities and allowing an individual in the team an
opportunity to specialize his or her contribution.
Information on its own is not much use. It must be processed in order to identify
the important relationships within it. Drawing conclusions demands an
understanding of patterns of relationships and casual linkages that connect
businesses, their customers and their environments.
d. An ability to draw meaning from that information and use it to support decision –
making
This process of information has both ‘private’ and ‘public’ aspects. The private
aspect involves a detached and reflective consideration of what the information
means and what, in consequence, is the best option of the business. The public
aspect demands using information to make the case for a particular course of
action, to advocate particular options, to convince others of the correctness of that
course and to meet the objections. These two aspects do, of course, go hand in
hand.
The ‘intuitive’ side of analysis is often supplemented by the use of formal
techniques that can help business decision-making.
All businesses are different. They develop strengths that allow them to deliver
certain sorts of value to particular customers in a special and valuable way. They
have weaknesses that leave them open to attack by competitor. A variety of
conceptual frameworks can be used to guide the exploration of a firm’s strengths,
capabilities and weaknesses.
h. An ability to evaluate the business’s markets and how they are developing
A market is the total of demand for a particular god or service. The growth of
business will be sensitive to the development of its markets.
The business must have internal conditions that are flexible and responsive to new
possibilities and have the resources needed to innovative in an appropriate way.
The business must have the capacity to grow in response to those possibilities or
be able to hold of the resources include human skills as well as productive
capacity.
j. An ability to analyze the way in which decision-making occurs within the
business
Generally, businesses rarely recognize good ideas instantly and pursue then
without question. Usually a consultant must convince the client business that what
he or she is suggesting is a real opportunity. To do this an effective consultant
must understand decision-making in the business and use this knowledge to his or
her advantage. This demands knowing who is involved in the decision-making in
the business and use this knowledge to his or her advantage. This demand
knowing who is involved in the decision-making process and the roles different
individuals play. Analyzing the decision-making processes in the client business
is a first stage in building relationships with individuals in the business.
Most engagements undertaken by consultants will involve the solution of problems. Hence,
the consultant should have the ability to apply the analytical approach and process in this
problem – solving exercise. This process consists of four areas:
This phase has the purpose of full describing the underlying problem. It begins
with the initial recognition of a symptom pointing to the problem and ends with
the complete description of the problem.
This is described as the fact-finding and analysis which involves the gathering of
facts needed to solve the problem and analyzing these facts in order to clarify the
requirements of the best solution.
Also as the solution development phase, this involves the selection of the optimal
solution to the problem and developing a detailed plan of action. This plan of
action should include the rationale for its selection; expressed in terms of benefits
and advantages, the schedule of its installation and the needed resources.
4. Presentation
5. Implementation phase
This phase has the purpose of putting the detailed plan into operation and should
be the least difficult to do if the previous phases have been performed well.
It may, however, involve a high degree of logistic complexity. In some situations,
the deviations due to changed circumstances in the environment may become so
great that there may be a necessity to recycle back to previous phases.