Organizational behavior, Consulting and the Energy Industry
BPIR recently added a series of benchmarking presentations to You Tube.
1. A benchmarking example from the health sector (see it here)
2. What is benchmarking? (see it here)
3. Popularity of benchmarking (see it here)
4. Benchmarking is becoming easier due to advances in social media (see it here)
On July 15, I will be presenting at the Knowledge Worker Meetup, in Toronto. Here is the abstract:
Knowledge Management and the Tribunal of Experience
Benoit Hardy-Vallee, PhD
our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.
- W.V.O. Quine
“Knowledge” is an elusive, abstract concept, yet we use it everyday. I would like first to take the time to discuss this concept, highlight its key dimensions and suggest how knowledge management should be sensitive to a proper theory of knowledge. To do so, I will briefly revisit (at a high level, it’s Wednesday night for Pete’s sake!) the main tenets of contemporary epistemology, i.e., the theory of knowledge. The goal is to make the case for a conception of knowledge that properly differentiates knowledge from information. One of the key differentiators is that knowledge has to be justified, and ultimately it must face what Quine called the “Tribunal of Experience”: empirical evidence.
Having put that in place, I will argue that the framework known as “Evidence-Based Management” (Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, by Sutton & Pfeffer, 2006, HBS) is the surest bet as to how we should manage knowledge and even that Evidence-Based Management is Evidence-based Knowledge Management. A commitment to fact and evidence, I will suggest, should make us sensitive not only to facts about organizations but also to important facts about the Knowledge Worker: our own cognitive biases are the worst threat to knowledge, hence to its optimal management.
Speaker. Benoit Hardy-Vallee, Phd.
Benoit Hardy-Vallee is a consultant in the Operations Support Services (Utilities & IT practice) of SBR Global. Born in Quebec, he studied Philosophy of science and cognitive science in Montreal, Paris, Waterloo and Toronto. He worked as a project manager, web developer, event organizer, researcher and lecturer before entering management consulting at SBR Global, where he helps organizations reach their goals. His blog, Management Epistemology (http://www.hardyvallee.net), discusses organizational behavior, consulting and the energy industry. His interest for Knowledge Management started during his academic years. It continues to spark his intellectual and professional interest. Benoit also practices karate regularly. Currently at the brown-belt level, he hopes to get his black belt next year.
Additionally, Benoit has been a member of this Meetup group since its inception in January 2009
Not sure if it causation or correlation, but according to a research report by Service Performance Insight, The Professional Services Maturity Model:
organizations with a high confidence in their leaders delivered over twice as much margin (23.4% compared to 10.4%), higher revenue growth, lower attrition and almost double the number of projects delivered on time.
| Attribute | High Confidence |
Low Confidence |
| Revenue Growth | 15.9% | 11.3% |
| Contribution Margin | 23.4% | 10.4% |
| Attrition | 5.5% | 20.0% |
| Projects on-time delivery | 75.5% | ;44.2% |
Source: email from spiresearch.com.
“The 2009 Professional Services Maturity Model - A Comprehensive Framework to Assess Organizational Efficiency and Effectiveness across the Five Service Performance Pillars” is a 168 page benchmark report developed by Jeanne Urich and R. David Hofferberth, P.E.
Now even management consultants are feeling the squeeze - Times Online.
Management consultancies are facing their hardest market since the dot-com crash nine years ago. As financial services companies, typically among the biggest users of consultancies’ services, tighten their belts, the firms are moving their attention to restructuring work.
And BearingPoint files Chapter 11. Tough times….
1. Project Management. Any engagement or contract is a project, and a project has requirements, stakeholders and objectives. Successful project delivery requires risk, quality, cost communication and HR management. A consultant must master the art of managing projects.
Key resources: the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge ), the PM Podcast, and Projectreference.com
2. Time management. Time is a scarce resource. Like money, it has to be appropriately managed, invested, saved and spent. With a busy schedule, time management is a sine qua non.
Key resources: Getting things done, by David Allen, Lifehacker and The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch (see video )
3. Facilitation/interview. Many engagements begin by individual or panel interviews. It is important to get the right information from the right people.
Key resources: Facilitation skills workbook
4. Sales and Customer Relationship Management. Selling is no longer a foot-in-the-door technique. It involves creating a relation with a client, based on trust and fairness. There are many good book on sales, but I think that overall, the deeper, most influential will be Maister’s Managing the Professional Firm. As he says, “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”
Key resources: Managing the Professional Firm, by David Maister, or listen to his podcast.
5. Research. A lot of information may be needed to complete an engagement, and separating the wheat from the chaff is not necessarily easy. Research involves digging, sorting, categorizing, tagging, combining, linking, summarizing, extracting information.
Key resources: Besides the databases that your company have access to, Google is your best friend. But try also Google scholar, searching Delicious (tagged links are a goldmine of information), try these tips for Google search . Since each practices and each contract is different, in the end, the best resources will be those site you keep using. Bookmark them to save some time. Or create your own search engine with Google Custom Search.
6. Problem-solving. Problem-solving is the stuff of consulting. It is hard to learn it: you have to have a certain taste for solving problem, an analytical capacity to break problem in smaller chunks, and a holistic ability to draw inference between different items. You can however cultivate it.
Key resources: Nothing beats George Pólya’s 1945 book How to Solve It
Energy companies are expected to spend nearly $7 billion more on consulting in 2011 than 2008, according to Kennedy Consulting Research and Advisory .
The energy consulting market is forecast to increase at a CAGR of 8.3% through 2011, the growth of which will outpace that of the overall global consulting marketplace. The needs for consulting within the energy industry are both significant and varied. The most forcible trends currently impacting the industry include: business model alignment, determination of future energy mix, acceleration of major capital projects and “run for the resources.”
Well, according to a new study by Maconomy reported in Top-consultant.com, that is the case:
Resource management: When a hunch is not enough
Neil DavidsonAn international study by Maconomy on resource management shows that almost half of consulting firms are unable to plan more than one month ahead. Let me repeat that – on average, engineers, accountants, business consultants, marketers and advertising people operate in a world where the uncertainty of the future hovers on the one-month horizon.
The sad fact is that the consulting industry is failing at the very core of its business – resource management. In the UK alone, 52 per cent of consulting companies have patched together individualised resource planning sheets in Excel or Access. For the study as a whole, only 20 per cent of companies could claim that they had the ability to track resources across the entire organisation. The consequences of this means that one department may be strapped for hands, while consultants are plentiful down the hallway in another division of the company. And it is costing companies all the while – a crazy predicament to be in, especially given the current economic climate
This lack of transparency appears on another level as well. Many companies are very secretive about their resource planning and refuse their employees access to the resource management system (such as it is). In the US and Benelux for example only 18 per cent of those in charge of planning resources have access to the system as opposed to Denmark, for example, where 27% of all employees have full access. Still, we are talking low figures.
These numbers are even more startling when we consider that the consulting industry survives by planning. In conducting the study, we asked a series of questions about resource management to over 250 consultancies, which face the daily struggle of best managing their consultants’ time. From the answers, it is clear that the problem with planning is costing companies vast sums of lost revenue and putting undue stress on resources. At the same time, there seems to be a certain acceptance within the consulting industry; companies have simply grown used to operating in the dark. According to the study, problems with recruitment, retention, and employee utilisation rank at the top of participants’ concerns. However, in one way or another, these preoccupations all speak to the larger planning problem.
What do these findings mean in terms of the bigger picture? Well, right now the bigger picture is bleak and exhibiting schizophrenic tendencies, but that doesn’t mean that we should resign ourselves to ignorance and doom. Sure, it isn’t always easy to plan, but consulting companies are incredibly vulnerable in a financial crisis, and there is no room for guessing. I am certain that the companies that will come out on top in the coming months will be those that can act on facts.
We are already seeing what glancing nervously at the person next to you means for the market, but it requires a commitment to knowledge to prevent getting pulled along with the raging current. If we are going to weather the storm, we have to give up tentative, informal planning in favour of a professional planning solution. We have to get the right consultants on the right projects at the right time, so that we can see the whole picture. It means involving our employees and giving them access to the resource management system.
We are not talking rocket science here – it is pretty simple, but surviving in today’s market requires more than an Excel sheet and a hunch.
Author Details:
Neil Davidson
Managing Director
Maconomy
From ManagementConsulted:
the management consultant’s dictionary - from “bandwidth” to “wordsmith”
enjoy !
As a newcomer to the Management Consulting blogosphere, I would like to start by recommending a few great M.C. blog:
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Benoit Hardy-Vallée, PhD |
| Working in a Management Consulting firm (SBR Global), I blog
about organizations, decision-making and energy. My background includes
cognitive science, economics and philosophy of science.
benoit@hardyvallee.net
|
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