Fuente: www.consultant-news.com  Publicado: 11.02.2009

As we venture deeper into the uncharted territory of the recession, it is becoming clearer and clearer that consultancy will be playing a vital role in helping clients adapt and change quickly enough to cope in very difficult conditions. But what of consultancy itself? What new models will emerge to cope with the changing nature of client demands?

One firm that believes that it has tapped into a new trend is B2E Resourcing, which is developing the notion of the “interim consultant” –a flexible consulting resource that dovetails into the increasing ability of clients to plan and direct, but not necessarily staff, their own change projects. This leads to a demand for consulting skills, but not necessarily the overhead that comes with them from a traditional consulting firm.

B2E Resourcing is itself an outgrowth from just such a firm–B2E Solutions, which was formed by ex Big Five consultants in 2001.

“We knew we didn’t want to do ‘friendly co-pilot’ consulting,” says B2E Resourcing managing director Tony McNeill, who previously worked for Accenture and Watson Wyatt.

Contact with alumni groups such as Excenture, a group for ex-Accenture and Andersen Consulting employees, enabled B2E to build up a substantial network of former consultants from major consultancies, which in turn piqued the interest of clients.

“We had a number of meetings with clients who basically just wanted the consultants, but needed help with the ‘bodyshopping’,” says McNeill. “What clients wanted was individual, independent consultants to go in and work on an interim basis with no supervisory input from a consultancy.”

The reason this model is feasible is because of the large number of ex-consultants who now find themselves working in industry.

“Since 2003 a lot of people have been shaken out of consultancy,” says McNeill. “Clients now want to find some ‘workhorse people’ who can work around them and do the heavy lifting.”

This change on the client side has been met by an increased supply of consultants who are leaving major consultancies at a junior level.

“More and more people are seeing the path to partner extending and extending, and are thinking, ‘I must be mad–I’m slogging my guts out and at the end of it I’m only going to be on £150k’,” says McNeill.

Generally these consultants are absorbed into industry or join other consultancies. The sole practitioner route can be very hard until you have built up a track record of projects. Now the interim route offers another option.

“If you look at the market for professional managers, interim management started in the 1970s,” says McNeill. “We predict that what happened there will happen to consultants and there will be a take-off in the interim consultant market.”

How big this market will be is a chicken-and-egg kind of question, as at the moment many of the potential buyers of interim consultants will be unaware of the potential resource or how to access it. While this will become an increasingly accepted way of delivering change projects, McNeill is not predicting the end of traditional consultancy firms which will still continue to provide direction and assurance where clients need it.

“But if you’re doing a project where there is likely to be no comeback and the commercial risk is low, why pay the risk premium?” he asks. “Also, you find that the big firms don’t want to deal with one man projects, whereas we’re pretty much exclusively dealing with one-man projects where it’s low risk and people just want a safe pair of hands.”

As well as continuing to develop the market for interim consulting, McNeill is now looking to grow the consulting arm, B2E Solutions, in conjunction with the network that has been developed by B2E Resourcing.

“If clients want us to take more responsibility for projects then we are more than happy to provide them with a partner,” he says. “We’re now looking to bring some partners into the consultancy business to grow that. Our resource pool is now so potent –we have 4,000 people on the books and no bench.”

There are an infinite number of ways to slice the consultancy cake, and clients are the ultimate beneficiaries of the variety of models on offer. At the moment clients are faced with a tough dilemma. Reduced headcounts and pressure on resources means it is harder to deliver change projects internally, but at the same time all external budgets are under tight scrutiny. Could the interim model offer them a way out of this impasse? We shall watch its development with interest.


All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.