Management Consulting Failures: How to Educate Customers and Shape New Consultants

NEW YORK - March 12, 2019 - PRLog -- Companies across the world spend billions on management consultants, although research findings state that over 70% of large-scale consulting projects fail to meet expected outcomes. According to an October 2018 Forrester report, 35% of projects fail to meet their original business intent, 38% missed their targeted timelines, and 34% failed to finish within budget.

The result? Revenue Loss for the client.

But guess who can gain revenue despite a projects delay or increased budget? The consultants.

While most top tier consultants (i.e. the Big 4 Management Consultants, Big 3 Strategy Firms, and mid-sized firms) provide training to their staff consultants, management teams, and partners, internal culture and lack of governance by consulting company leadership fails to ensure projects are scoped, started, and managed to completion without a hitch.

"It's ironic, and rather embarrassing, that the consulting powerhouses selling services on process improvement, innovation, and project execution can actually fail at it themselves," former consultant J.T. Patten says. "I've spent well over a decade in consulting seeing great talent brought in to fill the ranks of our project teams, they're given the Cool-Aid to drink at training, then thrown into a client project where they quickly feel like nothing that they have learned actually applies. One of the most common questions a fly on the wall would hear in a client site consulting conference room is, "Do you know what we're supposed to do?" And yet, the problems of inexperienced and mismanaged engagements have largely gone uncontested by clients and industry. "Other times, I've seen consulting companies hire talent from industry to lead their work, but unfortunately the people they have hired are the same ones who may have let their own company fail in areas such as regulatory compliance or IT implementations. It's mind-boggling."

Patten's recent book, Big 4 Management Consultant Confessions: How Not to Screw up a Consulting Project, is a conversational style reference book where he shares project anecdotes of how stages of an engagement went wrong, then follows up with tips on how to move forward.

"My intent was to provide some quick insights to clients as to how a consulting engagement ideally goes down and share some of the vulnerabilities that may exist if the proper attention and project controls are not considered from the beginning," says J.T. "The intent is not an outing of any person or any one company as much as it addresses some bad things that can happen and a way to navigate from those landmines. It's a quick read, maybe an hour or so that is designed for a client or consultant to breeze through while on a commute and gain highly valuable insights."

Big 4 Management Consultant Confessions: How Not to Screw up a Consulting Project is currently available on Amazon in Kindle version and print. Audio by Hollywood actor and voice narrator, Charles Kahlenberg, is in production with an expected release by March 30, 2019.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PFYPV3D/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp...