MANAGEMENT CONSULTING CONTENT TERMINOLOGY

Useful for:

 First-year consultants looking to immediately improve “professionalism” and “consulting-

like” writing on documents, emails, etc.
 First-year consultants to understand and get involved in content discussions right on the
first day
 Future aspired consultants looking to implicitly showing their “consulting-like”
background on resumes

Notice: This document only lists out “content” terminologies, those likely be used in final end-
product documents to be delivered to clients. For other informal jargons (those only daily verbal
conversations), please refer to other documents or our website.

No Terms Simple Definition Examples of a typical consulting writing

Let’s turn this ad hoc process into a structured
1 Ad hoc Non-structure
and efficient one.

“We have interviewed key stakeholders to get

2 Alignment Agreement
client alignment on the overall approach”.

A standard or point Share of short-term debts is higher than

3 Benchmark
of reference benchmarks across sub-holding companies.

How things should Both the documented policies and actual

4 Best practice
“best” be done activities undertaken are at best practice level.
Market growth is expected to slow down but still
Compound annual
5 CAGR stays at healthy level of 8.4% CAGR over the next
growth rate
5 years.
To be a marketing EPC company, we need to gain
6 Capability What can you do several key capabilities. One of the most difficult
is to “engineer” a project.
Capital
Power, transport infrastructure and processed
expenditure; or
7 CAPEX industry will contribute 66% of total ABC’s CAPEX
cost on the
from now till 2015.
investment side
How to make
Change The board decided to implement the overall
8 changes happen in
management change management plan.
big organizations
Strength; ability to XYZ lacks the capital to expand, hindering its
9 Competitiveness
compete long-term cost competitiveness.

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 Difficulty; draw- Half of the market is out of ABC’s reach due to its
10 Constraint
back; etc. capital constraints.

Flagship; main Steel is one of the core business lines of XYZ in

11 Core business
activity terms of revenue.
Our deliverables for this workstream include the
End products of
12 Deliverables master strategy and detail implementation plan
consulting projects
for the cement segment in the next 10 years.
Initial research at
Diagnostic the beginning of Comprehensive diagnostic assessment should
13
assessment any consulting be implemented as soon as possible.
project
Growth of industrial production is the largest
14 Driver Cause demand driver, accounting for XX% of total
electricity consumption in YYYY
Comprehensive; The supervisors should manage and construct
15 End-to-end
complete projects in an end-to-end manner.
In project feasibility calculation, the
How possible
16 Feasibility miscellaneous cost should only be 2-3% of total
something is
cost.

17 Fitness Appropriateness You need to test this plant’s development fitness.

Significant and The firm has expanded its footprint in the real
18 Footprint powerful presence estate and social infrastructure construction in
in something synergy with the urban development business.
Completely Delta should become a full-fledged EPC attacker
19 Full-fledged developed or by developing core strengths focusing on 3
established segments
E.g: HR, Finance,
IT systems are vulnerable while HR and Finance
20 Function Operation,
functions also show gaps.
Strategy, etc.
There are key gaps across all critical control
21 Gaps Difference
functions that ABC needs to address.
Leadership & The complicated organization structure of XYZ
22 Governance management creates a multi-layers governance structure with
system large size of total board member.
Our staffs take pride in providing impeccable
23 Impeccable Perfect
service.

This steel plant performance is in line with

24 In line About the same
market average but room for improvement exists

Develop an IT infrastructure that enable stability

25 Infrastructure System; foundation
and growth

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 ABC could pursue performance improvement
26 Initiatives Actions initiatives to further strengthen hydro power
generation’s contribution to the Holding.
Taking the
27 Leverage Apple should leverage its strong brand name.
advantage of

Ways to improve There are three levers to boost sales conversion

28 Levers
things rate at branches.

Market Market The first phase in our project is to get a big-

29
perspective understanding picture market perspective.

We used robust review mechanism to control

30 Mechanism Method
residual risk during a project.

The company passed the £6 million milestone

31 Milestones Mini goals
this year.
Operating
expenditure; or Despite low investment, all OPEX items of this
32 OPEX
cost on the project will be relatively high.
operation side
Improving toward
We have an experienced sales force but there is
33 Optimization the best possible
still room for further optimization.
outcome
Over the last 6 weeks, we have examined the
How different parts
34 Organization organization structure, governance and internal
of a company is
controls of XYZ.
How efficient and The client needs to more actively manage capital
35 Productivity effective things are allocation and productivity, associated debts
run with CAPEX and ensure debts are manageable.
Significantly and The board guided three-year Human Capital
36 Restructuring massively changing Transformation Plan including restructuring
something divisions and alignment to business strategy.
Rigorously improve performance of ABC Steel to
37 Rigorous Comprehensive
remain competitive.
The manager presented the outline of
Overall timeline-
38 Roadmap implementation roadmap with key milestones
based plan
and resources requirements.
Bottleneck that The root cause of the problem lies in the poor
39 Root cause
causes the problem construction of the bridge.
The small piece
after breaking
The team should focus on projects in niche
40 Segment down big problem,
segments.
industry,
workstream, etc.

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 We first need to test this division operational
41 Soundness Goodness
soundness.
The client should develop a holistic urban
Where to play;
development strategy to become the developer-
42 Strategy What to play; How
of-choice for large-scale urban development
to play
projects.
In organized
XYZ’s business support functions are largely over-
43 Streamline system and with
sized, overlapped and can be streamlined.
specializations
Although fragmented and subscale, our plants
44 Subscale Small are geographically well positioned to serve
industries in the North.
Things when
Synergy between different properties (e.g.
combined create
45 Synergy residential, shopping mall complex, office)
greater value than
enhances total land value.
sum of each part
Significantly and The firm tries to become cost leader in existing
46 Transformation massively changing business lines through lean manufacturing
something transformation.
Bringing something
ABC cement is facing serious financial challenges
47 Turnaround from slums to the
and chance for turnaround is small.
surface
Make the best use Low sales volume has kept the capacity
48 Utilization
of something utilization rate low across ABC’s cement plants.
The western European cement market is
Type of breaking fragmented with many players across the value
down business chain. Some focus on raw limestone, some
49 Value chain
activities based on specialize in clinker production, some just do
chronical steps cement grinding, while a few others are best at
retailing.
Value Selling points; what Large scale project offers attractive value
50
proposition customers need proposition for potential foreign partners.

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