Consulting Club

“Grooming "The future consultants at AFMI"

The AFMI Consulting Club is a student association, which seeks to equip the student body with resources to make informed decisions on consulting careers, tools necessary to build successful careers in consulting and opportunities to promote extra-curricular excellence. The club anchors these efforts by creating forums for aspirants to learn and imbibe skills and best practices from industry experts and harnessing initiatives that enable students to assimilate the learnings into practical application. The club has over 450 members, who come from diverse backgrounds and bring in valuable work experience.

In addition to providing practical experience through workshops, guest lectures facilitation, the Club serves as the nucleus for pioneering strategy games and consulting projects and has developed a reputation for unmatched innovation, with activities spanning several spheres like Management Consulting, Risk Advisory, Process/Operations Consulting, IT Consulting, Benchmarking Advisory, outsourcing/ offshoring advisory services, Food Laws Consulting, Food Safety and Quality Management System Consulting.

Our Mission : "Why we exist"

 

To develop, enhance and showcase the Consulting potential of AFMI students that attracts top consulting firms to campus.

 

Our Vision : "Where do we want to go in the future?"

 

- Build awareness and generate interest for the consulting domain among students.
- Create and Maintain long-term corporate relationships with top consulting firms of the world.
- Make available all resources necessary to build content and competency on campus.

 

The objectives of the Consulting Club are :

 

• To equip the students with the tools and resources necessary for careers in the consulting domain
• To create a forum for information exchange among the industry and students.

 

Learning the 7 Cs of Consulting :

 

Every consultant needs a clear and concise change model that can drive the success of a wide range of change projects. The article is inspired from the the book : Seven C's of Consulting, by Mick Cope. Here Cope offers just such a model, the proven 7Cs--client, clarify, create, change, confirm, continue and close. This book offers both new and experienced consultants a solid framework for managing any consulting assignment. The 7Cs model helps to improve your professionalism, and deliver clearer and more measurable results to your clients and bring them back for more.

 

The underlying principles behind the profession of consulting are :

 

• Consulting is fundamentally about change. It is about using your competence to help another person, team or organization make a transformation from one state to another. The change might be a physical, cognitive, emotional, structural, technological or organizational change. The fact is that unless something changes, why should reward be forthcoming from the client?
• The application of a change model that makes sense to the client as well as the consultant benefits any consultancy project.
• In consulting, the basic steps are common to all assignments. The scale, context and outcomes can always differ.
• Any consulting framework can only act as an indicative rather than a directive model. Since content and context drives a consulting project, no two will be the same.
• Successful consulting is about making a difference for the client and consumer. The goal is to deliver a contracted change and not a successful consultancy project.

These guiding principles are used to justify the 7 Cs: right form meeting the client to closing the contract. However, they are no way the only sacrosanct principles that must be employed in all situations. The underlying idea is to offer an outline framework within which a consultant can understand the context of the situation and develop the most appropriate solution.

 

What are the 7 Cs ?

 

The 7 Cs framework is composed of a number of dynamic stages, each of which emphasizes a different aspect within the consultancy life cycle. Each stage depicts a particular phase that a consultancy project will follow. A set of sub-elements and diagnostic tools are used within each stage to ease the engagement process. Each of the stages can be undertaken independently, jointly or in parallel with each other.

 

To quote the author, the seven stages are:

 

1. Client: Define the client’s orientation of the world, their perception of the situation, their goals towards the final outcome and the one who has the power to influence the outcome. After this stage is concluded, you will have a clear agreement about the value to be delivered to the client and the value the client will offer in return.
2. Clarify: Evaluate the nature and the detail of the problem to be addressed. Map the construction of the system under consideration, identify the people and resources to be included and excluded from the change and evaluate which are the areas that pose a risk for the assignment.
3. Create: Make use of creative techniques to develop a detailed plan that specifies what actions will be included in the change process, the appropriate resources, the stream owners and potential change problems.
4. Change: Grasp the fundamental aspects that drive and underpin the process, such as the energy sources, change points, entry levels, emergent factors and proof of success.
5. Confirm: Make sure that the change has taken place, taking into consideration the issues of data focus, ownership, depth, timing and design of the management process.
6. Continue: The change has to be sustained, using learning that emerges from the transition, the skills of the change agents and the sharing of new knowledge and skills.
7. Close: The engagement with the client has to be closed in such a manner that you emphasize the need to understand the final outcomes, the added value, new learning and the further course of action.

 

Timing for applying the model:

 

The model can be used in any situation where a change is being managed, irrespective of the time-scale.

 

Timing for applying the model:

 

The model can be used in any situation where a change is being managed, irrespective of the time-scale.

 

Sequence:

 

It is important to emphasize that although the stages in the 7 Cs model are shown in a sequential manner, it is a rare consultancy project that will follow such a structured path. Consulting projects are very much like life: they are unpredictable and will throw up new and different surprises around every bend. The stages are symbolic rather than prescriptive, offering different actions and viewpoints to be applied depending on the needs of the client, consumer and consultant.

For instance, the consultant’s first meeting with the client might take place when the company is in a dire situation and needs urgent action to be taken the following day. So although the pressure will be to skip the initial stages and jump directly to the Create and Change phases, at some point he might need to backtrack to clarify a few things, such as forming a more structured contract with the client and identifying what caused the problem in the first place. Without this knowledge, there is always a chance of imbalance occurring. While the client might feel that the consultant has failed to get to the bottom of the issue, the consultant might believe that the client has little real interest in the engagement.

Alternatively, the consultant might be asked to take on a sub-contract for a specific part of a programme from another consulting firm. As an example, the project is to manage the Change stage within the model, specifically to deliver known and specific output. As a project manager, it will still be needed to consider the before and after factors. In undertaking any project, it is important to understand who the client is, how the project is designed and what options exist to deliver the project plan. Finally, when completed, the consultant will have to measure and confirm that the change has been delivered according to plan. So even where the sequence is broken up to offer other people discreet packages, all the elements in the 7 Cs have a clear role.

Lastly, even when focused on one particular stage of the model, consultants still need to be aware of, and draw on, elements from the other stages. In the Create stage, consultants will have to aware of the issues that will help to maintain Continuity; how the change will be Confirmed or measured; what research data within the Clarify stage might have been slightly suspect; or if the contract with the client needs to be modified as a result of changes in the implementation plan. So although at any time there will always be a dominant stage, consultants will need to run a number of other stages in parallel.