Consultancy Skill Management

It is said that one hundred years ago, there was not any industry related to the management consultancy. However, there had already been a lot of occupations which played roles like consultants in different areas for long periods of time, such as prime ministers for ancient kingdoms, military counsellors for battles and so on. In this case, it is not hard to find out that the consultants must be ones who were different from the ordinary and then they could be chosen for some particular reasons owing to there were usually one or two consultants in the huge organisations at that time. Basically, the consultancy means to deliver specialist skills or knowledge from outside the organisation (Calvert, 2001). Nowadays, consultancy is being one of the most popular industries with the rapid development of the information technology, and as a result, the consultancy firms have also become a bombing industry which focuses on offering necessary service and support based on knowledge and skills to organisations or individuals on a contractual basis. This essay will pay attention on the topic of consultancy skills, some theories and models about consultancy will be applied, and most of light will be shed on the topic about managing consultancy skills for the organisations as well as individuals.

In terms of the nature of the consultancy process, the consultancy is a process in which there are exchanges of value among consultancy firm, individual consultant and client (Thomas, 2004). Firstly, there are requirements come from client when they are facing some kinds of problems which they have no accurate idea but have to find out the solutions. As a result, they have to look for feasible assistance from the consultants who have specialist knowledge and also remarkable ability to solve problems, and then the consultancy firms are the centre of the consultants as individual consultants have been gathered in the firm on a contractual basis. So the clients have to get in touch with the consultancy firm in order to have access to the most suitable suggestions which will be given by the most calculated consultants in different cases. Generally, the process of consultancy can be separated into several main parts, it is said there are seven Cs in the whole process, namely, client, clarify, create, change, confirm, continue and close (Cope, 2003).

At the bottom, the nature of the consultancy process is still the exchanges of value. The consultancy is a business about the time, the final success depends on the value of what the consultants can achieve in that time (Greenwald & Milbery, 2001). In general, the client provides value as fee income and product development opportunities to consultancy firms, and the consultancy firms provide the value as revenue, knowledge and business development to the individual consultants, finally the individual consultants give the value as specialist knowledge and past experience to the clients; and vice versa (Cagney, 2010). So the primary demands of consultancy process that makes on the consultant should be specialist knowledge, particular skills and professional spirit and character. Specifically, the consultant should be someone who has diagnostic capacity owing to diagnosis is usually the first step of the whole consultancy process. A good diagnosis is usually the key point in terms of the whole process and also leads to the final result of the possible solutions. After that, the consultant should be someone who has good management skills because it is always necessary to make sure that the tasks of work, time management and resource will be handled well enough in order to make the whole consultancy process go well. Last but not least, the consultant needs very good communication skills and presenting skills since that the consultancy is a business as well as an art based on communications (Saam, 2012).