Glossary

A

Application Service Provider (ASP)
A company that provides applications and software to offers its clients that would otherwise be stored on the client's own computers.

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B

B2B
Business-to-Business.

B2C
Business-to-Consumer.

Balanced Scorecard
A framework for creating a strategy based on a number of financial and non-financial measures. Usually: financial, customer, internal business processes, and learning and growth.

BHAG
A 'Big Hairy Audacious Goal'. The term was created by Collins and Porras (1996) to describe an ambitious strategic aim, such as Amazon's 'Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds'

Blue-sky Thinking
Having no constraints to one's ideas or strategies. Often seen as the most interesting type of consulting project, blue-sky strategising is increasingly rare as clients no often do this for themselves.

Boiler-plate
The practice of changing the front-cover of a consulting deliverable to disguise the fact that the work was produced for a different client. Most common with standardised deliverables (e.g. in ERP solutions). It is a disparaging term.

Bricks-to-Clicks
A traditional non-internet based company which adds an e-commerce site.

BSD
An abbreviation used to describe a very experienced senior decision-maker.

Business Architecture
The business architecture is a simplified concept of the structure of any business. It often comprises visual diagrams and often provides different levels of granularity, including the strategic view, the process view, and the information view. Consultants are often bought in to 'lighten' the business architecture through redesign.

Business Development
Sales.

Business Owner
The business owner is the person in the client organisation who requests, and is responsible for, a piece of consultancy work. The business owner often will need to through procurement to process their request.

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)
Business processes are those chains of activity that cut horizontally across several departments. For example, 'Manage Complaint', or 'Process Order'. The re-engineering of such processes involves measuring and improving these through the use of IT. They are often related to redundancies.

Business Requirements
A business requirements are a statements of what the business, as opposed to any other view, such as the IT view, requires of a project. A business requirement may be a statement such as 'all customer orders should be confirmed within two hours of their receipt by sales staff'. Often business requirements are used to ensure that IT projects do not lose their focus and deliver what the business wants, rather than what the IT developers want to build. A medium-sized IT development project can result in thousands of business requirements being collected. Business requirements are often translated into Systems Requirements by IT analysts.

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C

Cactus Job
A boring role which is usually far below the skill set of the consultant performing it.

Case Interview
A specialist type of interview common in consultancy recruitment. It usually involves the interviewer providing the candidate with a business problem and asking them to generate solutions. See Chapter 11 for more information.

Change management
A service where a consultancy supports a client through a period of significant change. Examples include mergers, IT implementations and restructuring.

Chinese Walls
Chinese Walls are information barriers that are put into organisations to separate functions, people, processes or departments that may have a conflict of interest. For example, some audit companies have consulting arms and these arms are not supposed to receive confidential information about a client's capabilities. Moreover, those who audit a company's accounts should not be swayed by consultancy income that the client is generating. The effectiveness of Chinese Walls is highly debateable.

Core competencies
The critical path is the group of activities that cannot be shortened in time to make a project end sooner. A critical path analysis identifies these core processes and ensures that everything that tasks or processes which can be done in parallel are done that way so a project is completed on time.

Critical Perspective / Critical Management Studies
The critical perspective takes human emancipation rather than organisational efficiency or profit as the starting point of any analysis. Critical scholars focus on issues such as exploitation, stress, power and control in organisations and seek to show how these impact on people and society.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Term that refers to the analysis of customer information to provide a better service to them. It usually involves the use of IT for data-mining, automation and advertising optimisation.

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D

Deck
A collection of slides, usually created in PowerPoint.

Deliverable
A deliverable, is, unsurprisingly, something that a consultancy is required to deliver. This can range from a deck of slides to a completed change management project.

Down-sizing
A euphemism for making people redundant. Sometimes called 'right-sizing'. Unsurprisingly, right-sizing rarely involves increasing headcount.

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E

ERP
Software that helps streamline a company's business processes. ERP software, such as SAP or Oracle, often integrates HR and Payroll information systems. ERP is often dependent on a certain extent of Business Process Re-Engineering.

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F

Framework Agreement
An umbrella agreement with suppliers, contractors, or consultants where specific terms and conditions are specified to structure the generation of future work within a specified time-frame. For example, if a client expected to be using a consultancy at several points in the future, they may generate a framework agreement with that consultancy in order to set expectations and save time with future negotiations.

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G

Gravy Train
Is slang for any excessive, money-making opportunity. Often referred to in conjunction with politicians, bankers or consultants, being on the gravy train suggests a person has access to easy money for relatively little work.

Guesstimate
In recruitment interviews, candidates will often be asked to approximate a quantity, for example the number of golf-balls that would fit in the Empire State Building. Often, a guesstimate will be used as part of a case-interview.

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H

Hot-desking
Hot-desking is a system by which a worker is assigned any available desk when they need it. This system, usually used when employees are rarely in the 'main' office, can save the company significant space and, therefore, money. Many consultancy firms use hot-desking for this purpose.

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I

IBC
Institute of Business Consulting.

Intellectual property
Is the legal ownership of an idea, concept or invention. In the consultancy world it usually refers to the products, deliverables, code or other creations that they produce either for clients or for their own marketing.

IT / Systems Development
IT and Systems development is the name given to the way in which computerised products, systems and applications are created. This often involves a number of different roles: product managers, business analysts, systems analysts, technical architects and coders. The development process is often dependent on a methodology such as RUP, SSADM or Agile.

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K

Kick-backs
An illegal or clandestine payment for a favour. This is commonly associated with payments (in kind or cash) to decision-makers that grant suppliers, contractors or consultancies favourable terms.

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L

Letter of Intent (LOI) / Letter of Proposal (LOP)
Often used before a formal contract, this document is used by a consultancy to explain to a client how they will plan and approach the project.

Leverage
Leverage, in consulting, is the ratio of Partners to all other consultants in the firm. A high leverage ratio is usually indicative of low-fee implementation consulting work, a low leverage ratio is often indicative of high-fee strategy work.

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M

Management Innovation
A management innovation is a novel and coherent way of organising employees. Examples include TQM, BPR, Management by Objectives and Core Competences. Some academics call these 'fads' because they often become highly popular before disappearing from the corporate landscape.

2x2 Matrix
This is a favourite framework of consultancies everywhere consisting of two perpendicular scales, each with two categories. These combine to produce four squares. Many consultants believe that every problem can be simplified into a 2x2 matrix.

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O

Off-shoring
Outsourcing a business process or function to another country.

Outsourcing
Outsourcing involves hiring a third party to perform functions or processes more commonly done internally. The economies of scale and the expertise that the third party can achieve by specialising in these tasks often means they can offer higher quality performance at a lower cost. Typical outsourced functions include IT development, payroll, recruitment and accounting.

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P

Preferred Supplier List (PSL)
Preferred Supplier Lists (PSLs) are used by clients to specify a select group of consultants that managers within that organisation can chose from when considering consultancy contracts.

Procurement
The acquisition or purchasing of goods and services by an organisation. The purpose of the procurement function is to ensure the client organisation gets the right goods and services for a competitive price. Procurement functions are sometimes outsourced through third parties.

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R

Requirement
A requirement is often used in systems development and a specification of something that the system should do. A business requirement specifies the need in terms of the business, whilst a system requirement specifies what the system must be capable of doing in order to achieve the business requirement.

RFI / RFP
The Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Proposal (RFP) are documents that a client issues when they wish a project to be undertaken. The former is more general than the latter. Consultancies use these as a basis when writing their proposals.

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S

Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)
Made law in 2002, this act was in response to a number of corporate scandals where financial conflicts of interest damaged the companies. The legislation set new standards for the governance of financial processes and decision-making, made auditors more accountable, and ensured that more financial transactions were disclosed.

Scope Creep
Sometimes termed scope-creep is when a project loses focus and those involved find themselves doing tasks that do not contribute to the delivery of the project's original objectives.

Silo Thinking / Silo Warfare
This is when an organisation has divided itself into distinct areas, often on departmental lines, and is losing the ability to think across the organisation. Silo warfare is when this has resulted in an employee's loyalty being located with their department to the extent that the overall company performance is damaged.

Six-Sigma
Six Sigma is a propriety form of process control and measurement for use in client companies. Consultants can become accredited in different levels of Six Sigma training.

'Soup to nuts' consultancy
'Soup to nuts' is a North American expression for a complete meal, traditionally starting with soup and ending with nuts. In consultancy terms, this means operating at all levels of an organisational hierarchy, from strategy consulting to implementation.

Stakeholders
Stakeholders are people or organisations that have an interest in something. Stakeholders were traditionally assumed to be shareholders and senior management, but are increasingly including employees, local communities, NGOs and customers. During consulting projects, a stakeholder communication strategy is generally a good idea.

Strategy houses
A strategy house is a nickname for the large US strategy consultancies that were amongst the first consultancies. These include McKinsey, BCG and Bain.

Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Supply chain management is a process of improving the efficiency of a company's supply-chain through data analysis, process re-engineering, systems integration and supplier management. Well integrated supply chains often mean higher efficiency, less waste, lower costs and superior information regarding the ordering and delivery times of supplies. A good supply chain will integrate supply chain management to customer ordering processes.

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T

Tendering
Tendering is what a consultancy does when it pitches for a client's business. A client will often issue an Invitation to Tender (ITT) or a Request for Information (RFI). The tendering process is usually controlled by the client's procurement department.

TQM
Total Quality Management is a form of operations management that aims to continuously improve the quality of a company through worker involvement in quality circles, suggestion schemes and other participatory practices.

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U

Up or out
A people management approach, common is strategy consultancies, which requires consultants to be promoted in a specific space of time or to leave the firm. It is often necessary to ensure that spaces are always available for new recruits.

Upselling
A sales technique to add extra cost, items or services onto an existing purchase by a customer.

Utilisation rate
The percentage of a consultant's time that is actually billed for compared to the entire period of time that they are paid for by the consultancy. For example, if consultant X is paid for 300 days in the year but is billed to clients for 200 days, their utilisation rate is 66 per cent.

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V

Value-based management
A management strategy which is explicitly focused on maximising returns to the shareholders, either through dividend payments or through share-price increases. The concept has been widely criticised as simplistic.

Venture capital
Financing of companies, usually in exchange for stock.

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W

White paper
A paper written to educate the market on an issue. Consultancies write white papers to demonstrate thought leadership on topical issues.

White space opportunity
An opportunity for a company develop an area where it currently has no capacity. For example, by launching a new product or entering a new market.

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