Generally, the main obligations of management consultants to their clients are to assist the client to, solve management or operational issues, create value for its customers and stakeholders, reach new market and most importantly, help in achieving operational excellence.
Management consultants are expected to use their skills and experience to provide contemporary solutions to their clients for the clients to improve business performance. Astutely, for management consultants to perform their activities to please their clients, their work should be underlined by integrity,confidentiality and non-circumvention.
Often than not, clients charge their management consultants to identify problems in the organisation, analyse business structure, evaluate management staff, interview and observer employees, analyse financial data, prepare business plan, feasibility studies, performance analysis, budgeting, controllership and create and give presentations, organise work space and meet the clients’ client on their behalf.
In this agile environment, the importance of management consultants cannot be undermined in this 21st century. Let me take a break and highlight how external management consultant assisted in the Ghana banking crisis.
During the 2017 bank clean-up exercise, business advisory firms, who also serves as management consulting companies, werecharged by the Bank of Ghana to retrieve Ten Million Ghana Cedis from the 31.000 creditors
Even though consultants are supposed to cordially work with their clients to achieve productivity, however, in the course of executing their duties, there are some key challenges that hinders productivity or deter the relationship management consultant and a client
between a From our experience, the key challenge between management consultant and client are diverse expectations between the consultant and the client and the resistance between the consultant the client. Under these two min challenges, wehave outline the sub-challenges management consultant and their client experience in working together
Management of firms mostly seek to achieve specific goals of the firm by satisfying both internal and external stakeholders at the same time. The client, who sometimes cannot identify the problem well, can behaviourally explain what appears to be the problem to the management consultant
Sometimes the expectations of a client are different from the management consultant because of “un-documentation with respect to what the client requires
According to Gabor and Deming, quality is an ever-improving process but it is the customer that defines quality. It can therefore be inferred that, the expectations of the client are paramount than the expectations of the consultant
It is incisive for the consultant to advice the client on the objectives, however, as earlier stated “quality is defined by the customer. The motivating factors of client and management consultant expectations are outlined by scope of work, specific obligations of each parties, how the task to be executed, cost budget, consultancy fees and the application of resources and technology. It is always prudent for both parties to establish modalities that is underlined by steps of engagements, deliverables, duties and responsibilities. The below are recommendations for management consultants t expectations with the client. merge their
i. Engage the client, understand the needs of the client and document the client’s expectations
ii. Establish and promote cordial relationship with the client.
iii.Establish communication channels and processes to promote feedback and expectation understanding
iv. Achieve the deliverables and demonstrate understanding of the client’s expectations
v. Accurately assign task. responsibilities and duties to parties involve so each party knows how and what to do at what
stage to perform their assign task
vi Outline the resources that will be needed
execute the project,
vii. It is important for the management consultant to listen carefully to the feedback from the client and leverage on
consultant-client discourse to rectify deviations and problems
viii. It is ethical and professional for the management consultant to respect the client its customers, its employees, its suppliers and other stakeholders.
ix. it is also intelligent for the management consultant to always focus on the project at hand, be practical appreciate project.
