Six Essential Skills for Management Consultants – and Key Resources

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

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