Dawn of a new era for consulting
Wipro recently merged it's consulting business with Digital. I am putting some thoughts below as to why this is a forward thinking and disruptive move
Traditional consulting is quickly losing its relevance amidst changing marketplace. There are multiple reasons for the same. Information arbitrage is being “googled”, historic benchmarks are getting disrupted & change management is being driven by relentless competition and customer expectations. Organization architecture as a lever for transformation is becoming far less critical due to the fluid and adaptive market needs and a “customer” is the best consultant a CEO can have. Market is highly competitive and agility is a must. Companies can’t afford to waste time in identifying a problem, getting consultants to provide suggestions, get buy-ins & approvals and then make the changes. Last but not the least, technology is becoming CENTRAL to all transformations.
Amidst this changing landscape, traditional consulting needs to make way for “Consulting enabled by DIGITAL”. This DOES NOT mean consultants now carry fancier gadgets to their clients’ locations. BUT what it does mean is, consultants resolve the new age challenges with new age thinking, technology and most importantly newer ways of working including “agile”.
Let me take an example. I have myself run engagements around process improvements where we went as a team, understood the existing processes, polled internal stakeholders and finally came up with a set of recommendations balancing all the likes and steers given to us by important stakeholders. The engagement ran for about 3 months and some of the recommendations got implemented after about couple of quarters while moving through the wade of approvals.
What would change if we were to run a similar engagement?? We would do much more “customer first” polling than the internal stakeholders, go equipped with technology capabilities including mobility, cloud driven rapid prototyping, include “design” led thinking and “design’ skillsets in our team. This would lead to presenting to “end customers” as well as to our clients, ideas, wireframes, prototypes and finally minimal viable prototypes (MVP) in the same time frame which we took in the past for creating a point of view presentation. We would use the MVP to launch to end customers, get feedback and rapidly repeat this cycle with high frequency till such time that the product is near complete. Lest this makes you think that I am talking about product development, let me clarify that an MVP and product terminology is being used here for a market facing product, an intranet, an employee app or a change in the manufacturing process or KYC process.
What does this change do to the skillsets required? Today we need consultants who know the business (like earlier) but at the same time are design thinkers, technology embracers, customers’ custodians and hyper agile to add real value to their clients. Consultants need to become full stack, pretty much the same way that we are expecting engineers and developers to become full stack.
I am delighted with this love and hope to make a big impact in the consulting marketplace alongside my consulting colleagues.
Driving Product Transformations with Generative AI
9 年Great thoughts Rahul. I completely agree and think that going ahead we may not see any projects including large transformation programs in old style that have multi years difference between defining the vision(consulting) till adoption. This is because the speed of innovation has changed and this can lead to rapid change in vision. Existing vision may no longer be relevant say for 5 years and will require to be tweaked rapidly resulting in realignment of products/services. This will require agility that cannot be achieved in traditional methods. It will lead us to new methods like the ones mentioned in your blog to be relevant and successful.
Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle | PanIIT USA | WHEELS Global Foundation
9 年Good article, Rahul.
Vice President Projects
9 年Rahul - interesting and inciting read. The best way to embrace this change would require professional from the domain. As pointed in the article - we are expecting engineers and developers to form a full stack. Its a good news for engineers who are in the field and shop floors... They can now be part of IT developers team.
Digital Transformation, IT Advisory, IT Sales
9 年HI Sir, These are interesting times to be in. What do you think of the traditional consulting firms graduating towards the digital landscape. Most of the traditional and reputed consulting firms have started a digital practice. Mckinsey, BCG, Bain's are all creating offerings for the digital space. How do you see them as a competition to the likes of an Accenture / Deloitte who were pretty strong in the IT space already. And also how can firms like Infosys and Wipro (traditional IT services firms) create a differentiated consulting offering in this space. Thanks Akhil