Log In
Or create an account ->
Imperial Library
Home
About
News
Upload
Forum
Help
Login/SignUp
Index
Management Consulting in Practice Publisher's note Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publishers and authors cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the editor, the publisher or any of the authors. First published in Great Britain and the United States in 2004 by Kogan Page Limited Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licences issued by the C
ForewordHow many management consultancy projects can claim to have made significant improvements to the lives of millions of people? The case studies in this book contain practical solutions to monstrously complicated problems requiring not only clever, innovative thinking and broad international experience, but tact and diplomacy qualities which would challenge the UN. Claims are often made for the impact of consultancy projects, but all too often this is at best piecemeal and at worst anecdotal. The majority of projects described in this book employed rigorous and extensive measurement techniques to assess the effectiveness of the initiatives and policies undertaken. Management consultants - or at least the benefits they bring - are regarded with a good deal of scepticism by big business (as measured in MORI's Captains of Industry surveys for example), and the media delight in telling us of big government project failures. This book does a great job of redressing the balance. Profess
Introduction What is ‘best practice' in management consulting? Can it be recognized, measured, and replicated? The Management Consultancies Association's Awards for Best Management Practice are designed to highlight the very best standards in all areas of management consulting, from business strategy, through operational performance improvement to outsourcing. Consulting firms entering for an award have to present case studies of their work with clients for evaluation by a distinguished panel drawn from industry and academia. The awards are given for real projects that make a genuine difference to clients' businesses. This book collects case studies from the most recent MCA award winners to show just how these firms and their clients succeeded in ensuring high-quality consulting. Each case study explores a unique business situation and the way it was tackled by the team. The case studies also examine how teams responded to the challenges that arose during their projects and the sometim
Chapter 1: The Power of Working Together Overview Business is not what it used to be. It used to be that a manager got up, arrived at (invariably) his office, managed the same processes, ticked the same boxes, talked to the same staff, day in day out. A consultant, when he (again, invariably) was called in - which was not very often - was present purely as an adviser, a sounding board for the manager's concerns, a person whose business school education gave him superior techniques for solving the problems his client faced. Today's client is just as likely to have an MBA as a consultant; indeed, he or she may be an ex-consultant. The consultant is just as likely to have had line responsibilities as the manager. Clients expect consultants to be committed to their opinions and accountable for the results, to be doers as much as advisers. Consultants want to be able to share the credit if things go well; they also know that they will have to share the risk of failure, too. According to Der
Chapter 1: The Power of Working Together
Reasons for Selecting a Particular Consulting FirmBoth clients and consultants agree that the ability to deliver is the most important reason why clients chose a particular consulting firm (see Table 1.2). Clients do not want consultants who fall into the conventional trap of writing a report, then walking away from its unfeasible recommendations. They want consultants who are committed, who can roll up their sleeves and make things happen, and who are accountable. Consultants, too - as the case studies in this book demonstrate - are keen to slough off their hit-and-run image. Table 1.2: Factors leading clients to select a particular consulting firm, ranked by importance Rank Attribute 1 Ability to deliver 2 Experienced consulting team 3 Specialist expertise 4 Originality of approach 5 Experience of client sector/market 6 Reputation 7 Existing relationship with individual 8 Technological resources 9 Recommendation from client networks 10 Existing relationship with firm 11 Price competi
Reasons for Selecting a Particular Consulting Firm
The Challenge of Consulting ProjectsWhile clients and consultants mostly agree on the factors taken into account in selecting a consulting firm, there is more variation in their perceptions of the hurdles that have to be overcome. Both sides recognize that timescales and complexity are often significant problems (see Tables 1.3 and 1.4): after all, no one's going to call consultants in to do something easy. Table 1.3: Consulting firms' perceptions of the challenges to be overcome in consulting projects, ranked by importance Rank Attribute 1 Stakeholder buy-in 2 Complexity of project 3 Time frame 4 Cultural challenges 5 Expectations of client 6 Scale of project 7 Communication with client 8 Consultancy firm's understanding of the business 9 Changing requirements 10 Budget limitations 11 Skill limitations 12 Changing deadlines 13 Changing personnel (client) 14 Changing personnel (consulting firm) Table 1.4: Clients' perceptions of the challenges to be overcome in consulting projects, ran
The Client-Consultant RelationshipThe MCA Awards Survey allows us to compare and contrast the attitudes of clients and consultants. We have to be cautious here. Human nature (and some of the responses) suggests that there may have been a degree of collusion between the two sides when it came to commenting on this most sensitive issue. There remain, however, some points worth drawing attention to. Both sides make much of the level of collaboration and openness achieved in the practical, everyday running of the projects: ‘Our relationship was characterized by close communication and understanding. It was very open and honest.' ‘There was complete openness and honesty around how we need to work together in order to handle the delivery issues.' ‘Our relationship was open, constructive, mutually supportive and open to change.' However, it is also clear that even the best relationships go through rocky patches, particularly in the early stages of a project, primarily caused by individuals fa
Meeting Client ExpectationsBeing able to measure the impact of consulting has become something of a holy grail for clients and consultants alike. Clients want the reassurance that, in bringing in consultants, they have made the right decision and that their selection of a particular firm will stand up to scrutiny. Consultants want to be able to demonstrate a track record of quantifiable results to an increasingly sceptical client base. However, no two consulting projects are alike and measuring them against a single standard would be highly misleading. The MCA Awards Survey therefore asked clients to rate the extent to which the consulting firm had exceeded, met, partially met, or not met their expectations in the following categories: motivational (eg improvements in staff satisfaction); ability to finish a project on time; greater management capability; improved customer satisfaction; increased productivity; reduced costs; changes to headcount; increased revenue; acquisition of new c
Summary - Key Lessons For Managers and Consultants More and more work is being done on a project, rather than permanent, basis. Organizations are becoming portfolios of opportunities and resources: some of those resources will come from outside suppliers, such as consulting firms, who offer experience and specialist knowledge. In this environment, collaboration - across internal divisions, with external partners - will be key. As the case studies in this book show, genuine collaboration is best secured at two levels: the corporate (shared risks and rewards) and the individual (personal chemistry). The most important reasons for choosing a particular consulting firm are that firm's ability to deliver, experience and specialist knowledge. Clients are also more interested in originality than in a firm's size, geographical coverage, or even its reputation. Both clients and consultants recognize that getting buy-in from all those involved is perhaps the most serious obstacle to effective co
Chapter 2: What Sets Excellent Consulting Apart? Foundations of Good Consulting The factors that distinguish good consulting probably have not changed since the early 1980s, when the era of the independent adviser gave way to that of the large-scale, complex projects that dominate today's skyline. That these factors have not changed is certainly a testimony to their fundamental importance to the consulting process, and may also indicate that - even 20 years on - clients continue to be frustrated by the number of projects that fall short of this standard. Project, time and cost management Clients want consultants to play by the rules. Once a project has been agreed, clients want consultants to do what they have said they would, when they have said they would do it. They also want to be charged an agreed amount of money, not write a blank cheque. When consultants step outside the parameters of a project, they can erode the benefits of a project perhaps to a point where the costs exceed t
Chapter 2: What Sets Excellent Consulting Apart?
Projects That Exceed Client Expectations If the four attributes outlined above constitute the bedrock of good consulting, what distinguishes the best? Using the MCA's survey of the projects submitted for its annual awards, it is possible to separate out the factors that apply specifically to projects that exceeded clients' expectations, as opposed to projects which just met those expectations. Collaboration, communication and culture Perhaps the single most common word across the projects that exceeded client expectations is ‘together'. ‘It's amazing,' said one client, ‘what can be accomplished by a small number of people, when focused on a challenging goal and working effectively together.' According to another, these projects demonstrate ‘the power of working together rather than relying on just the consultant to deliver'. But it would be easy for collaboration to become another of those terms that become devalued by overuse and underpractice. What does it actually involve? Putting t
The Best of the Best The three case studies in this chapter all feature overall winners of the MCA's Awards for Best Management Practice. The first two, the International Olympic Committee's work with SchlumbergerSema, now Atos Origin, and PA Consulting Group's work with Westminster City Council, are the Platinum Winners from the 2003 and 2004 awards respectively. The third, Edengene's work with BT Business, won the 2004 award for the best project by a small consulting firm. Collaboration was important at all levels when Westminster City Council came to reorganize itself around customer needs, rather than internal functions. Long-standing internal boundaries had to be demolished, and there was a danger that, by using external consultants to help, the Council would only succeed in creating new divisions. In fact, the word that is most prominent in this case is ‘help': PA did not carry out the work on the Council's behalf, but helped Council employees to develop their own solutions, ensu
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants The prerequisites of good consulting are: effective project, time and cost management; specialist experience; leadership; and the transfer of skills from consultant to client. However, for a consulting project to exceed client expectations, it also needs to involve a combination of innovative thinking with a high degree of practical applicability. Beyond this is the need for genuine collaboration between clients and consultants. While many projects pay only lip-service to the idea of working in partnership, having compatible cultures, encouraging open communication and establishing common goals, in practice all play a critical role in consulting success. Case Study 2.1: Customers Driving Local Services Techniques of commercial customer relationship management (CRM) can transfer elegantly to the public realm, and put local citizens back in charge of the services they need. Here is a trick question: Which is the nearest city to London? O
Chapter 3: Change Management Overview What stops organizations doing what they want? Everyone is aware of the often yawning chasm between strategy on paper and implementation in practice. There is no easy or single solution to the complex issues involved in gaining employee commitment to a new idea or to changing long-standing behaviour and values. Indeed, some would say that such things cannot be changed, that new people with different attitudes have to be brought in. Others would argue that the problem is primarily one of scale. While you cannot tell an organization en masse to change, individuals can be coached to do things differently and become role models for their colleagues. But the impact of even the most evangelical managers rarely goes beyond their immediate teams, its broader acceptance blunted by cynicism. The three case studies in this chapter demonstrate that it is possible, not only to change people's behaviour, but to change it on a substantial scale.
Chapter 3: Change Management
Change and ScaleThe Living Service Programme developed at Tesco, an international retailer, was designed to improve the motivation and morale of the company's 220,000 employees. The UK's Department of Work and Pensions had to change the way its staff worked before it could start on an even harder task - encouraging people in receipt of state benefits to move away from the traditional means of collecting their allowances (in cash from local Post Offices) to cheaper, more secure payments directly into bank accounts. Transport for London and London's Metropolitan Police had to overcome long-standing cultural barriers to joint ways of working in order to make London's buses safer. In all these cases, there were substantial obstacles that had to be overcome: Divisions and boundaries. A decade after Michael Hammer and James Champney, the gurus of business process re-engineering, exhorted companies to break down the barriers that divided their organizations, many of those barriers remain inta
Public and Private Faces of Change Management ConsultingA closer look at the projects described here suggests that change management consulting is not one, but two things. Where they were working directly with employees, the consulting firms had to adopt an innovative approach: They had to adopt a fresh approach to old problems. A major factor in changing the individual behaviour of store-based staff at Tesco was Trilogy's use of Brad Brown's ‘Choosing your Attitude': a programme that encourages people to take control of their lives and work and that was totally new to Tesco at the time. ‘This has been fantastic,' commented one employee who went on the programme. ‘Most important to me is that the skill of choosing my attitude has turned me from a grumpy, stressed-out guy into a dad who has rediscovered his spark.' It is the fact of using something new - as much as the actual technique - that is important here. A genuinely new approach can often break though the mental paralysis of whic
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants Bringing down the barriers within and between organizations may reduce one set of obstacles to change, but it creates another - multiple stakeholders. Successful change management involves confronting and reconciling, not bypassing, the different - sometimes conflicting - aims of those involved. Radical change can be easier than incremental change because it demonstrates the willingness of senior managers to resolve - rather than pay lip-service to - serious issues. Effective change management consulting follows Teddy Roosevelt's advice of ‘speak softly and carry a big stick'. In terms of its public interaction with employees, it needs to adopt innovative, even unexpected approaches. Behind the scenes, consultants have an important role to play in maintaining momentum and credibility. Case Study 3.1: Living the Brand - For Real The UK's biggest retailer is making strides in customer service by working at the personal level. This is a s
Chapter 4: Human Resources Overview The HR function of popular mythology is staffed by short-sighted bureaucrats bogged down in inventing ever more labyrinthine rules: more Stasi than strategy. As in any myth, there is an element of truth in this. While publicly upholding the view that ‘people are our greatest asset', it is a rare organization that puts its HR function on equal footing with operations, sales or marketing. Like IT managers, HR managers typically find themselves falling between two stools. These two groups are guardians of an organization's most important assets - its people or technology - but they are also under constant pressure to minimize the costs of that asset. HR managers are responsible for overseeing compliance to an increasingly heavy burden of regulation, but they are also expected to be flexible and responsive. While they are in the forefront when it comes to reshaping organizations through mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing and offshoring, budget cuts often
Chapter 4: Human Resources
Advising Versus DoingIt is also clear from these three cases that consultants are playing an increasingly important role in the day-to-day running of the HR function. Consulting here is not a nice-to-have, an optional extra: instead, consultants are performing fundamental and necessary work. The key here is specialist knowledge. As one of the more mature consulting markets, bound by regulatory barbed wire, consultants have to be experts in very specific fields. The MoD selected Right Management Consultants to work on the Career Transition Partnership because of the company's record in career management and counselling. At Evotec, HR Director Martyn Melvin made a similar choice: ‘By working with Penna Consulting, we were able to tap into real experience that made the project work extremely smoothly.' ‘We were immediately impressed by the professionalism and knowledge the group possessed,' says Jeff Bender, the Vice President of HR at Apache. ‘It was readily apparent that they had 'been
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants HR managers are habitually in a difficult position, caught between the conflicting needs of organizations to cut costs while retaining employees' energy and commitment. Caught between two stools, they often fall down the gap. Overcoming this institutional handicap depends on five factors: - dividing more HR work up into short-term projects with definite end-dates; - being flexible; - working with employees wherever they are based, instead of expecting employees to come to them; - adopting a facilitative approach, providing employees with the information and tools they require to take their own decisions, rather than taking those decisions for them; - replacing gut instinct with hard data when it comes to pinpointing and resolving employee issues. HR consultants are an accepted part of the HR function, providing specialist expertise on HR techniques and regulatory compliance. However, while know-how may be an important factor when it co
Chapter 5: Operational Performance Overview At any point in the economic cycle - bull years and bear years - the vast majority of businesses are performing neither very well nor very badly. Their markets are not growing; their cost bases are relatively stable; there are no major threats or opportunities on the horizon. The reasons for stalling may be many and varied; some may be familiar, others less obvious. They are united only by the fact that they are hard to solve. Improving business performance is the traditional backbone of consulting, stretching back before World War II. Today, when people calling themselves ‘consultants' abound in almost every walk of life, it remains the standard by which the consulting industry differentiates itself from other forms of temporary labour - body-shopping, contracting, even interim management. When the MCA revisited its definition of ‘management consulting' in 2002, it concluded that it is: ‘The creation of value for organizations, through the a
Chapter 5: Operational Performance
The Five Pillars of Operational ConsultingThe case studies in this chapter highlight five fundamental ways in which consulting firms help organizations to improve their performance. Seeing the wood for the trees One of the key ways in which consultants can help improve performance is by pinpointing the underlying cause of a problem. Every one of us finds it hard to step back from our daily lives: even the smallest organization can become bogged down dealing with the here-andnow. We apply the same thinking to the same problems, but expect different results. For someone to come from the outside, as a consultant does, and see a situation clearly and disinterestedly can be enormously helpful. This is just what Kepner-Tregoe was able to do at Sun Microsystems when they realized the key to improving complex customer problems was the quality of information transferred from one shift of support engineers to another as they worked around the clock - and around the world. Ashridge Consulting cha
Miracles and Parables What's common across all five of these factors - as well as across all four of this chapter's case studies - is that clients and consultants have to work closely together. If the consultants are bringing a new approach to solving a problem, then the client brings intimate knowledge of the context for that problem, what kind of solution is being sought, whether any attempt to resolve it has already been made. Each side needs the other in what is the antithesis of the outsourcing model - where suppliers (consulting firms, IT service providers and so on) solve problems on their clients' behalf rather than showing them how to solve them themselves. The organization that allows a supplier to take over the resolution of a problem learns how to manage suppliers, not how to resolve the problem. In some areas, this makes good economic sense: using a supplier's specialist knowledge to solve one-off problems is far more efficient than trying to build up in-house skills. Howe
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants Improving operational business performance has long been, and still remains, the bedrock of consulting. The best operational consulting has five characteristics: - being able to distinguish the precise cause of a problem from its symptoms; - appreciating the constraints the client is under; - bringing management tools and techniques that are new to the client and which help resolve the issue; - ensuring that the consultants' skills are passed on to clients; - ensuring that the changes made are sustainable. However, the best operational consulting also recognizes that it requires the combined efforts of consultants and clients. This is not just because each party brings different, but equally important, skills and expertise. Clients have to learn how to solve operations problems themselves, if they are going to be able to raise their overall performance. Case Study 5.1: Blue Skies, Blue Bills and Online Breakthroughs BT managed to build
Chapter 6: Business Strategy Overview Strategy has not had an easy time since the millennium. Squeezed by a combination of economic downturn and endemic scepticism about the visionary ideas of the e-business boom, most strategic planning departments - if they still exist - have retrenched. They have focused on the operational issues like how to yield bottom-line improvements in more acceptable timescales, and on the organizational changes often ignored by the high-flying strategy of convention. Now, with the global economy starting to pick up, managers are rightly asking: What role does strategy play in our organization? How can we ensure that the ideas we have on paper can be realized in practice? The two cases in this chapter represent the full spectrum of responses to this question. At one end, we have Capgemini, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the Duke of Edinburgh's International Award programme and developing suggestions for future direction. Hugely successful (more tha
Chapter 6: Business Strategy
Strategy Consulting: Smaller, Leaner, Fitter Strategy consulting was the main casualty of the downturn in the consulting market after 2001. Yet, as most consultants will tell you, strategy consulting has by no means disappeared. Certainly, with few organizations brave enough to commit resources to a full-scale strategic review, strategy consulting projects are smaller on average than they were 10 years ago, but the underlying reasons why clients find the input of consultants at a strategic level are as relevant today as they were during the boom years of the late 1990s. The most important of those reasons comes through particularly clearly in these cases - the objective view that a consultant as an outsider brings to any situation. With no vested interest in the result and an ability to stand back from the day-to-day pressures that affect every manager, a consultant is in a unique position. As RightCoutts' work with the Harrogate Trust illustrates, the best consultants are also trusted
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants The reputation of large-scale corporate strategy remains severely damaged by the false promises of the dotcom era. Instead, organizations are focusing their strategic thinking Bringing down the barriers within and between organizations may reduce one set of obstacles to change, but it creates another - multiple stakeholders. Successful change management involves confronting and reconciling, not bypassing, the different - sometimes conflicting - aims of those involved. Radical change can be easier than incremental change because it demonstrates the willingness of senior managers to resolve - rather than pay lip-service to - serious issues. Effective change management consulting follows Teddy Roosevelt's advice of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. In terms of its public interaction with employees, it needs to adopt innovative, even unexpected approaches. Behind the scenes, consultants have an important role to play in maintaining
Chapter 7: Technology Exploitation Overview The four case studies in this chapter illustrate the extent to which IT and IT consulting have evolved over the last 10 years. In the mid-1990s, it was the private sector that set the pace. A large-scale IT project might have required hundreds of consultants working with a much smaller team from the client side. Typically, it would have involved the implementation of new software that had to be tailored to meet the specific business needs and had to run on new hardware. Today's IT challenges - and the pioneers responding to them - are vastly different. Three of the four organizations featured in this chapter are from the public sector; all are setting trends in the way in which they are using established technology for new ends. The scale and complexity of the projects are, if anything, greater. The technology used in London's congestion charging scheme involves cameras and software capable of ‘reading' car registration plates. Drivers can pa
Chapter 7: Technology Exploitation
Five Hallmarks of Success Making good use of tried and tested ‘new' technology Each of the organizations featured in the case studies in this chapter faced significant challenges. London's was the world's largest congestion charging scheme to be developed. The JTrack system for the Criminal Justice System involved the input of 43 police forces and 42 Crown Prosecution Service areas. The Bradford Teaching Hospital NHS Trust needed a system that would centralize procurement while simultaneously allowing clinicians to make requisitions as they moved around wards. But the solutions found did not involve state-of-the-art technology: instead, existing technology was used in new ways. SMS text messaging was one of the ways in which Transport for London (TfL) made paying the capital's new congestion charge as convenient as possible. JTrack provided the agencies involved in the persistent offenders' scheme with secure access to Web-hosted software. Clinicians in Bradford were given PocketPC dev
It Consulting: Leaner and Fitter?For IT consultants, each of the five factors above represents a significant change in their way of working: indeed, to a large extent, IT consulting has had to reinvent itself since the late 1990s. Internet technology made it possible to link people in different organizations, using different hardware and software. Concerns about the speed with which the market was moving meant that companies wanted the implementation of new systems to take months, rather than years. The continuing failure of a large proportion of new systems to deliver the expected benefits depressed demand for them, and encouraged managers to find ways of using their existing technology more effectively. More attention was paid to the obstacles that prevent systems from being used effectively. As these cases demonstrate, the new model IT consultant is very different from his or her predecessor. Instead of staffing complete projects, from project managers to junior programmers, the con
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants The best IT projects involve using recent, but still familiar, technology for new ends. Web-based and wireless technologies undoubtedly offer unparalleled opportunities to link people and organizations together, irrespective of their location or existing software. But technology does not have to be state-of-the-art for it to be used imaginatively. Finding ways to meet the often divergent needs of multiple stake-holders is a better guarantor of success than trying to override them. Users who think their interests have been neglected rarely have any desire to make a new system a success. However, the willingness to compromise and change has to be tempered with the need to get things done. Among organizations anxious to avoid the long-drawn-out implementation cycles of 10 years ago, the speed with which a system can be completed is crucial to management commitment, user acceptance and benefits realization. Old-style IT consulting would si
Chapter 8: Outsourcing Outsourcing has come a long way from the days in which organizations saw it as a way of washing their hands of a problem and cutting costs into the bargain. Once primarily a defensive strategy - shedding non-core work - it is increasingly becoming a means by which organizations can make radical changes. Second-Generation Outsourcing Although the need to minimize costs still plays an important role in the decision to outsource, all three of the organizations featured in this chapter were seeking additional benefits. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) wanted to use new technology to share information more effectively while complying with increasingly stringent regulatory demands. It also looked to outsourcing as a means of improving the procedures by which medicines are approved, not simply to automate the processes it has traditionally relied upon. The UK's Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA), responsible for overseeing a range
Chapter 8: Outsourcing
From Advice to DeliveryOutsourcing is big business for the consulting industry. 2001-03 has seen a significant shift away from more traditional consulting services towards outsourcing and outsourcing-related work. Philip Geiger is a Board Director at the IT consulting firm, Xayce: You only have to look at the number of outsourcing announcements by blue chip companies in the last few months to appreciate that the time is fast approaching when a lack of appreciation about IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) would be akin to ignoring the impact of IT in the 1960s. Clients expect their consultants to understand the many facets and implications of BPO. The upside is that this represents a significant opportunity (and one that will close as clients acquire the experience to do it themselves); the downside is that you won't be able to ignore BPO. You could get away with that for a while, but - ultimately - clients won't want to talk to you. From the supplier point of view, the case stud
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants Successful second-generation outsourcing projects are not predicated solely on the idea of cutting costs. Organizations are turning to outsourcing as a way of getting access to new technology, of replacing cumbersome processes with more streamlined, efficient ones. The resulting projects tend to be larger in scale and more ambitious in complexity. The keys to transferring responsibility successfully to external suppliers are: - contractual flexibility; - speed; - providing an incentive for clients and suppliers to work together through contracts that share the risks and rewards; - establishing an environment of openness in which people from each side work together as equals. The supply side is dividing into two distinct, mutually exclusive approaches. Some firms are taking an advisory role, assisting clients to find their way through the commercial pitfalls of large-scale, complex deals. Others are positioning themselves primarily as s
Chapter 9: Electronic Trading Overview Information is the life blood of a joined-up world. Yet, successive initiatives - knowledge management, e-business - have failed to deliver a free flow of information to those who need it in many, if not most, organizations. Old challenges remain, as the projects described in this chapter illustrate. Take-up is critical: how do you bring disparate, disorganized sources of information together without creating cumbersome, bureaucratic processes that deter potential users? The four case studies in this chapter faced the following challenges: With the general public seemingly ever more apathetic about the democratic process, e-voting is high on most governments' agenda. Could the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) use alternative channels to increase levels of inclusion, engagement, and participation? Then, having provided a multitude of possible voting channels, the ODPM had to ensure there was no possibility they could be abused, with one p
Chapter 9: Electronic Trading
Pull Not Push The first generation of knowledge management and workflow systems opted for the stick, rather than the carrot, approach. Compliance was everything: once systems had been developed, people had to be made to use them. This is not a strategy that would have worked for Aon, the ODPM or the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit. The ODPM could not force people to vote, anymore than Aon could have forced everyone to use its new electronic document management systems for all their correspondence. The Neighbourhood Renewal Unit could not argue the benefits of consistency (as Aon could have done), because its initiative was not intended to change what people do, but to provide them with an invaluable source of information on which ideas were more and less likely to work in practice. One way of encouraging more people to engage with government is to offer them a variety of possible channels, allowing them to select one that is convenient to them, rather than demanding that they go to a pollin
Getting the Technology RightElectronic trading is necessarily about moving information across systems, allowing (at a corporate level) organizations to exchange information quickly and accurately, and (at an individual level) people to access common sources of information easily, irrespective of where they are based or, indeed, of the type of technology they prefer to use. This means that electronic trading projects depend as much on integration between systems as they do on particular applications, the vast majority of which are imperceptible to the people using them. What can look like a common point of entry for different groups of people can, in fact, be more like spaghetti behind the scenes. It was certainly something like spaghetti that BAE Systems faced as it sought to link its 32 different ERP systems together in order to improve its procurement processes (most of which, not surprisingly, were still done manually). The solution was obvious - a single procurement gateway - but h
Technologists, Coordinators and BridgesFrom the projects described in this chapter, it appears that consultants have three distinct roles to play when it comes to implementing electronic trading initiatives. The first, not surprisingly, relates to the technology itself. Part of the role of Unisys, in working with the ODPM, was to advise on which technology to use and how to make it work in practice. Knowledge of state-of-the-art developments and new applications was clearly an essential component in making this work. Similarly, CSC Computer Sciences' work with BAE Systems depended on expert knowledge of how complex and disparate legacy systems could be linked together in practice. That complexity gives rise to the second role. In environments where there are likely to be multiple hardware and software suppliers (as Unisys found with e-voting), as well as multiple internal stakeholders, coordination is critical. When the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit hired PA Consulting Group to help with
Summary - Key Lessons for Managers and Consultants The first generation of organizations that have tried to ‘manage' knowledge have found that people could not be compelled to use the new systems - and, without constant updating, the systems languished. Focusing attention on usability, convenience and people's experience in using a system is more likely to increase take-up. Flexibility at the front-end has to be balanced with clarity and single-mindedness behind the scenes. Consultants can provide help in coordinating stakeholders and suppliers, as well as expert help in terms of the technology selected, but their key role is to provide a bridge between the front and back office. Case Study 9.1: Pioneering Multi-Channel Voting Helping 300,000 citizens pilot new voting channels required careful attention to communications and tight control of project tasks. Voting procedures in the UK have not fundamentally changed in the last 100 years. During that time the UK has resisted every mechan
References Friedman, M and Boorstin, D J (1951) How to Plan and Pay for the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need, in Roads in a Market Economy, G Roth (1996) pp 223-45, Avebury Technical, Aldershot Goldratt, E M (1994) Theory of Constraints, North River Press, Crotonon-Hudson, New York Kunde, J (1999) Corporate Religion, Financial Times Prentice Hall, London Williams, D and Parr, T (2004) Enterprise Programme Management, Palgrave Macmillan, London
Chapter 1: The Power of Working Together
Chapter 2: What Sets Excellent Consulting Apart?
Chapter 3: Change Management
Chapter 4: Human Resources
Chapter 5: Operational Performance
Chapter 7: Technology Exploitation
Chapter 1: The Power of Working Together
Chapter 2: What Sets Excellent Consulting Apart?
Chapter 3: Change Management
Chapter 4: Human Resources
Chapter 5: Operational Performance
Chapter 6: Business Strategy
Chapter 7: Technology Exploitation
Chapter 8: Outsourcing
Chapter 9: Electronic Trading
← Prev
Back
Next →
← Prev
Back
Next →