Arkimeda in the news
“Case studies are the poor relation of the consulting industry. Millions are spent each year by consulting firms on brand-building, advertising campaigns and writing books and articles. By comparison, case studies are rarely top of the corporate agenda, often pulled together in consultants’ spare time or as a rapid response to a sales opportunity. Yet case studies represent the consulting industry’s greatest untapped resource and could hold the key to maintaining growth in what promises to be an uncomfortable economic environment.”
Fiona Czerniawska, Financial Times, 17 November 2008
“Many institutions which have so far ignored the benefits of outsourcing are being forced to revisit it because of financial constraints and liquidity problems. Often they have failed to integrate and are still lumbering under a weight of legacy systems and processes and carrying both unnecessary variable cost and balance sheet assets.”
Fiona Czerniawska, Financial Times, 31 October 2008
“What can be done to make change management in the public sector more effective? … Another [thing] is not to leave change managemen to consultants. Using consultants to bring in specialist expertise in change management will help bolster internal skills and provide momentum but it should never be seen as a substitute for internal resources.”
Fiona Czerniawska, Public Sector Executive, September-October 2008
“No one expects 2008 to be a period of high growth for the UK consulting sector as a whole. The question is whether we will see a comparatively short period of lower growth or a more sustained and significant downturn.”
Fiona Czerniawska, Supply Management, 5 June 2008
“The typical amount a private sector organisation spends on consulting is something between 3-5% of its total costs goes on outside help from specialists. The figure in the public sector is something like 0.05% of its costs go on consultants, so there is a big difference in relative terms in the amount of money that goes on consultants between the public and private sectors.”
Fiona Czerniawska, BBC Radio Four, 21st November 2007
“Another big chunk of consulting is what we call operational consulting, which is the very nitty gritty stuff of going into a factory or an organisation and saying what could we do a little bit better, what costs could we save, how we could improve efficiency, and that’s good for shareholders, that’s good for public service delivery and its good for citizens.”
Fiona Czerniawska, BBC Radio 4, 21st November 2007
“A survey by the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) found that the single most important reason why organisations use consultants (70 per cent) is access to specific skills not available internally.”Our research shows that people want to access specialist skills they need for a short period of time, and the management consulting firms have those skills. There are ‘economies of knowledge’ because the client gets the benefit of using a consultant who has worked for different businesses in different places within a particular field.”
Fiona Czerniawska, FT Business of Consulting, 19th November 2007
“Historically, consultants were purely advisers who wrote reports, but 20 years ago they moved into implementation. However, in the last three years the pendulum has swung back to advisory work, particularly with the re-entry into the consulting market of three of the big four accounting firms. It is pretty balanced at the moment, but the advisory element is just in the ascendency.”
Fiona Czerniawska, FT Business of Consulting, 19th November 2007
“If people want to get stuff done and changed quickly then it makes perfectly good economic sense to bring in a bunch people who maybe expensive for a short period, but have got some specialist expertise. Do we really want people like the Post Office wasting money on trying to train up lots of people in a particular area when they could hire someone in for a couple of weeks with expertise.”
Fiona Czerniawska, BBC Radio 2, 31st October 2007
“The last two or three years has seen a complete sea-change in how consultants think about themselves and the vast majority of recruitment that take place these days are for senior people that have been there and done that.”
Fiona Czerniawska, interviewed on The World This Weekend, BBC Radio 4, 20 August 2006
“Management consultancy has changed. Once consultants would arrive, do their stuff, produce a report, send in the invoice and depart – leaving the client to make what they could of the findings. It was an ‘outside-in’ approach… But the basic model today, after years of questioning the accountability of consultants, could be described as the opposite – an ‘inside-out’ approach. Consultants have to work with management: they have to get their hands dirty to earn their keep. They may even be incentivised on results… ‘An ability to engage junior and middle-ranking staff in the client organisation is vital,’ says Fiona Czerniawska, director of the MCA’s Think Tank that conducted the research. ‘Consulting firms talk a lot about building up C-level contacts. These may be the people who sign the cheques, but it is the people that the consultants work with day-to-day who have to be engaged, not pushed aside, if a project is to be a long-term success.’”
Management Today, June 2006
“Fiona Czerniawska, director of the MCA, sounds a note of warning about how long the good times can last. ‘A lot of what we’re seeing is pent-up demand, especially in the IT area where projects have been put off,’ she says. ‘This may mean that when the catching-up has been done, the work will tail off. One thing is sure: no one is going back to the big projects of the late 1990s, which had such debatable results. People are buying proven packages and tweaking them for their own purposes.’”
Financial Director, 26 June 2006
“Consulting has a rather glamorous reputation but the [Association of MBA’ career survey] suggests that recent MBA graduates experience a reality check. A sizeable 17.3 per cent express an interest in consulting prior to their postgraduate degree but only 10.9 per cent find roles in consulting upon graduation. The discrepancy is no surprise to Fiona Czerniawska, director of the MCA’s Think Tank. ‘People have quite uninformed expectations of what the consulting industry is,’ she says. ‘They find consulting to be hard work and that it can be stressful.’”
The Times, 18 May 2006
“It seemed the heyday of management consultancy was over. But the sector has effected a dramatic turnaround, expanding its influence beyond advice to an entirely new business model. [Fiona] Czerniawska says: ‘The industry woke up after a long dark night to find its reputation deeply tarnished. Consultants knew they had to have a serious re-evaluation of their service offering.’”
The Sunday Times, 30 April 2006
“I think it’s easy for people to sit on the outside and pick holes and problems. We could give you a whole series of different projects where consultants have added enormous value and where the public sector has shown itself to be extremely good at following these projects through.”
Fiona Czerniawska, Channel 4 News, 7 April 2006
“But many consultancies are re-focusing their MBA recruitment programmes. Fiona Czerniawska, director the MCA’s Think Tank, says there has been a switch away from MBA graduates because consultancy firms are more interested in hiring people with business experience. ‘Practical experience has become very important because that is what the clients want. A lot hangs on individual consultants and clients want real specialists.’”
The Times, 23 March 2006
“Public sector consulting: poorly-paid, tedious and bureaucratic? Think again. Ten years ago, the public sector was indeed the Cinderella of the consulting industry. But the Government’s commitment to improving the quality of public services, the increasing involvement of private companies in public sector service delivery, and a generation of civil servants who want to do things better, have changed all that. Today, if you want to be involved in a leading-edge consulting project or implement ground-breaking technology, then you’ll want to work with the public sector.”
Fiona Czerniawska, The Times, 21 March 2006
“A report released today finds those who decide to use consultants are four times more likely to be satisfied with a consulting project than people who were seconded from elsewhere in the business to work on the project… Fiona Czerniawska, author of the report, commented: “Not surprisingly, decision-makers tend to view consulting projects in a positive light because that validates their decision to use consultants; it may also be that they are in a better position to see the overall benefits. Perhaps end-users and people seconded into projects from elsewhere in a client organisation feel put-upon; maybe they resent the consultants’ presence. There may be the people who can sign the cheques, but it is the people that the consultants work with day-to-day who have to be engaged, not pushed aside, if a project is to be a long-term success.”
Top-Consultant.com, 20 March 2006
“The shake-out in management consultancy looks as though it may be over….Fiona Czerniawska, director of the MCA’s Think Tank and author of the MCA’s annual reports on the state of the industry says: ‘Over-capacity around the time of the dot com boom was probably 20 to 25 per cent and there was a considerable shedding of staff, but since that there has been something of a recovery… ‘There’s been a consistent trend towards more specialist skills and knowledge. People who bring in specialist knowledge of a sector can provide an edge providing they have the other attributes you need to be a successful consultant.’”
Financial Times, 22 February 2006
“Management consultants have been pulled into the firing line as new ‘hit squads’ attempt to turn failing NHS finances around…. Fiona Czerniawska, director of the MCA’s Think Tank, said using consultants as a ‘band-aid’ was not a productive use of their expertise. ‘To bring people in to firefight isn’t a good way to proceed,’ she said. There should be an arrangement for external scrutiny and a fresh perspective, although I don’t think consultants should be there on a permanent basis.”
Accountancy Age, 9 February 2006
“The reason why people use consultants is we break into three areas. First is to do with the people that they get: so they get specialist skills. Second is to do with process. Consultants can come with prior experience of working of similar projects. They’ll have methodologies for working in particular ways. They can bring a kind of energy and commitment to a project which is sometimes hard to get if you’re part of a big internal organisation. And the third reason is they bring an outside perspective. I think any organisation – and the bigger, the more true this is – has to have people giving it an idea of what’s right, what works, what doesn’t work, where the challenges are. Everybody needs that outside view.”
Fiona Czerniawska, interviewed on BBC Radio 4, File on 4, 31 January 2006