Are you jealous of consultants?

You shouldn’t. True, their work might appear glamorous: you think they would speak to C-level executives only, providing Powerpoint-supported matrixes & magic quandrants; you believe consultants spend most of their time thinking hard, that their job is truly intellectual. In other words, the perfect, self-fullfilling job where your brains grows as fast as your bank account.

This vision is totally wrong.

A consultant, from his early age to his mid-30s, will spend most of her/his time in nit-picking Powerpoint template alignments, crunching numbers on Excel, or filling in questionnaires out of loads of factory workers in Dakota (I was there).

Consultants often recommend their clients to make use of best-of-breed software, but they hardly have time to improve their own internal processes since their business models rely on what I call the “timesheet dictatorship” or pay-per-time-spent-on-a-client. Basically, whether you read Daily Sports in the toilets or debrief a meeting doesn’t matter: if you think about your client, you bill it! So, most consulting firms rely on lazy processes, and still make good money. What if you could make them save money? Their margins would increase further, and your bank account would grow as fast as your brains (for once).

This is where I see an opportunity for clever software people. Get these bored consultants out of the wood, grant them with a glass of whisky to make them speak and listen to what they say carefully. Listen to their day-to-day workload: consultants pretend one day is never like the other because they move from a client to another; but do you think implementing SAP at Nestlé is really different from deploying SAP at Ford? do you think a cost-saving mission at Boeing really differs from a cost-saving mission at Ahold? I can assure you that the job doesn’t differ an inch. Just ask a senior consultant and (s)he’ll tell you (s)he can almost write the final recommendations without knowing the sector in which the client operates, or even the client’s name. To make a long story short, consultants spend a lot of time doing the same things for identical purposes in similar environments.

A well-thought, well-packaged software may help hell a lot the consulting industry. Actually, n well-packaged software may help a lot (n being the number of similar processes one would find between different consulting firms in different businesses).

So, if you are or have been a consultant in the past, which automatizable processes come accross your mind? What could software people automatize to ease your job a little? Help software developers and they’ll help you back. Consultants are too smart and costly to be left cleaning Excel tables & preparing presentations 80% of their time.

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