Tag Archives | business trends

Services Industry News: Quick Takes

By on July 6, 2011 in Business Life, Industry Trends

Here’s a brief roundup of links and news from around the services industry.

24% say they’d rather give up sex than sit through another PowerPoint presentation.

The Economist offers advice to consultants as demand for services rebounds.

Job market for consulting shows real signs of life.

What consultants are earning at 4,956 companies.

Accenture’s earnings beat expectations. Booz Allen’s profit surges.

PwC gobbles up consulting firm PRTM. The financial details are hush-hush, but you can bet some people will end up with bags of money.

Consulting Magazine selects its top 25 consultants for 2011. Mostly a vanity award?

According to the Boston Consulting Group, consumer sentiment is currently all over the map.

What do executives want from their CIOs? PA Consultants’ survey says cost savings, increasing operational efficiencies, and delivering consistent, stable IT performance.

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Services Industry News: Quick Takes

By on May 3, 2011 in Business Life, Industry Trends

Here’s a brief roundup of links and news from around the services industry.

CPAs: Half of our clients are still in crisis, in spite of improving business conditions. More than 25 percent of CPA firms are in crisis too, according to AICPA.

Smart people make the worst teams, according to MIT researchers.

Ever wonder just how much content is on the web? Here’s the answer.

Three stages of commoditization for consulting services, according to industry analyst, Fiona Czerniawska.

IBM is jumping into the Business Process Management business. Is any firm not in this market?

So, you want to be a consultant? One person’s lessons learned.

Research report: 75 percent believe IT projects are doomed before starting. Ouch.

ComputerWorld: 7 dirty consultant tricks (and how to avoid them).

Sparking creativity in teams: An executive’s guide, by McKinsey & Company (registration required).

Who’s using all those iPads?

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What Are You Getting Ready For?

By on April 21, 2011 in Business Life

michael mclaughlinEveryone knows that building new skills (and improving existing ones) is table stakes in the game of work. Ignore this reality and the market will pass you by. Most of us have plans for getting better at what we do, whether it’s becoming a better communicator, writer, salesperson, or project manager.

The skills that improve your performance now are essential for the present, but what about tomorrow? What skills and capabilities do you need to thrive in the work you’d like to be doing in three years (or five or ten years)?

Ask yourself this: what new skills should I cultivate so I’m ready for the opportunities I’ll create in the future?

If you want to write a book someday, for example, it’s never too early to learn how to write a book proposal, refine your writing skills, or understand the intricacies of book marketing.

By focusing on the skills you will need down the road, you get better at what you’re doing in the present, and set the stage for the future you envision for yourself.

What are you getting ready for?

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CEOs:Things Are Looking Up

By on April 8, 2011 in Industry Trends

PwC released its 14th Annual Global CEO Survey, which shows strong confidence in the growth prospects for the global economy. CEOs are almost as confident about growth as they were before the global economy tanked.

It’s understandable why CEOs are bullish. For instance, in North America, corporate earnings are at record levels and profit margins for non-financial S+P 500 companies are expected to climb to their highest levels in at least 18 years, according to Bloomberg.

Find out more about the PwC survey report.

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Project Failures: Symptoms vs. Causes

By on April 7, 2011 in Consulting Process, Managing Projects

michael mclaughlin

Why do projects fail? In a multi-industry study of 163 companies, researchers at PM Solutions asked that simple question. Their report identifies five primary causes of project failure:

 

  • Requirements: Unclear, contradictory, and ambiguous
  • Resources: Lack of resources, resource conflicts, and turnover of key resources
  • Schedules: Too tight and overly optimistic
  • Planning: Based on poor data, insufficient details, and bad estimates
  • Risks: Unidentified, assumed, or not managed well.

You could look at the list above and conclude that there’s nothing new in this report–and you’d be right. What’s so alarming, though, is that such problems still plague us. This report says that more than a third of company projects are at risk of failing.

But when I look at this list, I see symptoms of project failures, not causes. At the center of any successful project is competent leadership. When you see a failed project, you’re likely to also find poor leadership.

If you perceive one of these seemingly obvious “causes” for failure on a project, you’ll want to look further. The real problem is lurking elsewhere.

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Quick Takes for Service Providers

By on April 6, 2011 in Industry Trends, Managing Your Business

michael mclaughlinIs McKinsey & Co. the Root of All Evil? A catalogue of McKinsey-inspired strategies gone wrong.

Exposing the CULT in ConsULTant. A lawyer’s take on the myth of the business consultant.

How to Become a Management Consultant. If it was this straightforward, everyone would do it.

How to lose a client–fast. Some obvious points, but good reminders.

What do “social media” consultants actually do? Here are a few clues.

According to M2 Consulting, most independent consultants (76%) are satisfied or extremely satisfied with their career choice.

How much do management consultants earn? These numbers seem low.

Six Ways to Identify a Company in Decline. Add over-reliance on consultants to the list?

Good IT consultants can make bad employees. Is independent thinking an impediment to being a good employee?

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Podcast: Daniel Burrus on Seeing the Future

By on March 4, 2011 in Industry Trends, Management Consulting News, Managing Your Business, Podcasts

Meet the MasterMinds: Daniel Burrus on Flash Foresight

Dan Burrus, futuristDaniel Burrus is the author of the bestselling new book, Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible, and Technotrends.

Dan is one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists. He’s the founder of Burrus Research, a firm that monitors global advancements in technology-driven trends to help clients understand how technological, social, and business forces are converging to create untapped opportunities.

I asked Burrus how we can use the futurist’s tools to guide our businesses and help clients find those new opportunities.

Listen Now

Run Time: 18 minutes

Find out more about Daniel Burrus at www.flashforesight.com and www.burrus.com.

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The Best (Large) Consulting Firms to Work For

By on March 1, 2011 in Industry Trends

 

Last month, Fortune magazine released its annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Eight consulting/accounting firms earned a place on this year’s list. For most of those firms, job growth in 2010 was non-existent. Ernst & Young, for example, reported a 7% reduction in jobs, and KPMG shrank by 5%.

Most job growth was concentrated in the pure consulting firms–not in the full-service professional service firms. Boston Consulting Group grew jobs by 2% and Booz Allen Hamilton by 9%. These two firms were also offering the highest average salary of the consulting/accounting firms, but not the highest among the top 100 companies. For instance, a senior account executive at SalesForce.com (#52 on the list) reportedly earned an annual salary of $318,323.

 

Ranking and Firm
Average Salary
 2010 Job Growth
# 2 Boston Consulting Group
$154,501
2%
#26 Plante & Moran
$ 64,300
-4%
#63 Deloitte
$ 81,622
-1%
#73 PricewaterhouseCoopers
$ 86,826
-4%
#77 Ernst & Young
$102,593
-7%
#85 Booz Allen Hamilton
$112,728
9%
#86 KPMG
$ 73,300
-5%
#99 Accenture
$ 83,500
4%

 

Most of the firms on this list are still struggling to align their businesses with the market realities they face. So executives had to make tough decisions about how to size their practices and serve their markets most profitably.

 

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Got Online Learning?

By on February 24, 2011 in Managing Your Business

Photo by Eric James Sarmiento

One predictable outcome of the slumping economy: executives slashed budgets for in-person training events. For many companies, that was an easy target for the budget axe. Even though their budgets were smaller, managers still had an urgent need to continue training people. So they moved parts of their training programs online.

In 2008, 8 percent of employee training was delivered in virtual environments. In 2010, that went up to 13 percent, according to researchers at Bersin & Associates, authors of the Corporate Learning Factbook 2011.

Training budgets are slowly rebounding, but it’s inevitable that our clients will continue to ask for online training alternatives for some of their education programs. Consultants who can develop training content for delivery online can ride this wave. But achieving success is far more complex than simply offering a webinar-based version of your live training events.

Instead, look for strategies that allow your clients to choose the learning channels that make sense for their organizations. For example, some clients will ask for audio sessions, others will want video, and some will want webcasts. Some of your online programs could be pre-recorded and others offered as live events. You could deliver content at an in-person meeting, via computer, or on devices like iPads.

To play in this market, you’ll need a strategy that allows you to accomplish two goals for your clients. First, reach as many of each client’s employees as possible with highly targeted content at a reasonable cost. Second, offer an approach to measure the impact of the training sessions on the attendees’ work performance.

It’s unlikely that the trends in online learning are going to reverse themselves. It’s a great time to consider if (and how) you can add an online learning element to your service offer.

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Think You Are Multi-tasking?

By on February 23, 2011 in Consulting Process, Managing Your Business

Photo by Les Chatfield

It took less than two minutes after the speaker’s introduction before a familiar pattern played out across the room: Blackberries, iPhones, and laptops lit up as the audience got busy with email, texts, and other work.

After the presentation, most people I asked said that they could anticipate the direction of the speaker’s presentation, so it wasn’t really an interruption to fire off a quick email during the speech. “I need to excel at multi-tasking given everything I need to get done,” one person told me.

At first blush, that perspective seems right. Most of us believe we can follow a speaker’s train of thought even while doing something else. In reality, we can’t. When we try to do multiple tasks at the same time, research shows that our productivity drops by as much as 40 percent. That means we make mistakes, have to redo tasks, and forget to do some things entirely.

When we try to do more than one thing at a time, we’re not actually multi-tasking. Instead, we’re really switching between tasks quickly. Every time we switch back and forth, we have to reengage and that results in lost time–and productivity.

People will tell you that multi-tasking takes lots of practice before you can master the skill, but studies suggest that’s also an illusion. In fact, those who are heavy multi-taskers are less competent at completing tasks.

If you’re sitting in a boring presentation, you may need to check email or send a text just to stay awake. But if you think that you’re really accomplishing two things at once, you’re probably not doing justice to either task.

Try abstaining from multi-tasking for a few days. You’re likely to find that you’re accomplishing more, feeling less stressed, and being more creative. Focus on one thing at a time, and you might be surprised by the results.

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