Consulting transformed to be a business within a business over at Capgemini
How a pure consulting offering can sit alongside a wider range of service offerings has been a much discussed conundrum these last years. Doesn't independence suffer? Isn't attraction of staff diminished? Top-Consultant.com's management consultancy columnist, Mick James, spoke with Ian Jordan, Capgemini's UK head of consulting, and discovered their approach to building a consulting business within the wider service offering.
29 June 2006
Publication
Published with kind permission of Top-Consultant.com
How a pure consulting offering can sit alongside a wider range of service offerings has been a much discussed conundrum these last years. Doesn’t independence suffer? Isn’t attraction of staff diminished? Our management consultancy columnist, Mick James, spoke with Capgemini’s UK head of consulting and discovered their approach to building a consulting business within the wider service offering...
One of the most pressing questions facing the consulting industry today could be summarised as “where do the consultants sit?” -- or if you’re a consultant and therefore not into summarising, “how much of the advisory and transformational value chain is it appropriate to bring together in a professional services business model?” Or something like that.
If you’re currently engaged in building or rebuilding a consultancy business, you’re also facing a pretty vicious war for talent. Given the shortage of top people, and the large numbers of consultants to be found in those mainstream consultancy businesses, there’s obviously mileage in targeting not just individual consultants for recruitment, but the very premise of those large, integrated businesses. Time and time again, when we talk to emerging or re-emerging consultancies, we hear the message: “if you don’t want to be the front-end of an outsourcing sales operation, come to us”.
I call this branding ploy “aggressive nicheing” and thought it was time to hear the other side of the coin – so I spoke to Ian Jordan, head of Capgemini’s consulting business in the UK, about the challenges and rewards of big firm life.
The first point Jordan makes is that a lot of the stories of professional dilemmas and post-merger pain surrounding some consulting brands are getting very old—up to seven years old in some cases such as that of Capgemini. In earlier interviews with Top Consultant Jordan has spoken very frankly about the tough times the firm—along with the rest of the consultancy industry—faced in the early years of this century.
But seven years is a long time in consultancy, and during that time Capgemini has made some far-reaching changes in the business and is now enjoying the sustained growth that Jordan predicted last summer.
“We’re on a bounce in the UK,” he says; “As a business we have momentum in the market, and in the consultancy business momentum is everything.”
Jordan accepts that there are challenges running a consultancy business within a much broader organisation:
“People look at the huge behemoth of an organisation that is Capgemini and ask, how can you exist?”. However, Jordan believes that there are unique advantages to the integrated model:
“If you have the advisory and strategy capability plus the transformation skills and the ability to drive execution, and if you can make that work in your business—then you have the best of all worlds.”
Jordan accepts that from the outside an integrated firm may appear to work on the “one for all and all for outsourcing” principle, but in fact there is no need for consultants to have to choose between “independence” on the one hand and the opportunity to be at the heart of giant transformation projects on the other.
“Our consultancy lives and dies on its consultancy income,” he says: “It’s just as meaningful to us to have a small consultancy or strategy assignment as it is to drive a large outsourcing assignment. Half the time we are operating in an environment where we’ve precluded ourselves from any follow-on work.”
It’s the client, Jordan stresses, who makes the call in any given case, but this gives Capgemini the opportunity to offer its people a much broader variety of work:
“Our consultants can be working with one client on a purely advisory basis one day and the next assignment can be about the real world human impact of a major assignment with its roots in technology,” he says “That’s a differentiation for us in terms of the careers we can offer. As a result we are not struggling to recruit talented people, and we don’t lose any employees.”
One of the keys to this approach has been to keep consulting as a fairly well-defined “firm-within-a-firm” with a strong bias towards strategy and advisory work. ERP skills, for example, sit elsewhere in the Capgemini business.
Jordan describes his role as “steering to the left” by which he means ensuring the consultancy is always moving towards the upper reaches of the consultancy value chain.
“Consultancy is all about refining and growing your sector and subject matter expertise,” he says. As a result Capgemini recruits strongly from commercial organisations and also has a programme of secondments and transfers with the public sector.
This diversity, Jordan believes, is the key to the long-term sustainability of both his business and the careers of his consultants:
“That’s really the brand for us as a consultancy business--if I can maintain that left-hand steer to the business and also drag through the breadth of capacity of the wider organisation, that’s got to be a better proposition than being in a 30-strong partner business. But it’s important to do it in a way that gives you a level of independence—as a business within a business. You have to be as hungry as that niche business—to decide what things to go for and what to decline.”
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