And how is this justified, does the companies brand and support structure really outpace the value that consultant is creating by a factor of 20 or 30?
I'm not sure what he means here - the higher up you get, the better the ratio. For partners it gets inverted - they are making more than their billing rates because they're getting a cut of everyone below them's billing too.
When you buy consulting, you're buying a commodity. The premium is meant to insure you against natural variation, key people quitting, and so forth. Joe Accenture is meant to be interchangeable with any other Accenture consultant. A lot of the overhead is the extremely rigid, prescriptive methodologies that are supposed to make this possible. For multi-year projects, enough budget-holders believe that this is worthwhile for the entire Big Consulting industry to exist.
Comments
And how is this justified, does the companies brand and support structure really outpace the value that consultant is creating by a factor of 20 or 30?
I'm not sure what he means here - the higher up you get, the better the ratio. For partners it gets inverted - they are making more than their billing rates because they're getting a cut of everyone below them's billing too.
When you buy consulting, you're buying a commodity. The premium is meant to insure you against natural variation, key people quitting, and so forth. Joe Accenture is meant to be interchangeable with any other Accenture consultant. A lot of the overhead is the extremely rigid, prescriptive methodologies that are supposed to make this possible. For multi-year projects, enough budget-holders believe that this is worthwhile for the entire Big Consulting industry to exist.