| | By Mick James
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 – | |
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| | 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 in
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 | |
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| | 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 | |
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| | 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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