Key Driver of Value Creation In The Consultant‐Client Relationship

21228: Management Consulting Critical Reflection Essay

Key Driver of Value Creation In The Consultant‐Client Relationship

Reynaldo Garnanda 13466596

DECLARATION

I hereby certify that this reflective essay is my own work, based on my personal study and/or
research and that I have acknowledged all material and sources used in its preparation. I also certify
that the essay has not previously been submitted for assessment and that I have not copied in part
or whole or otherwise plagiarised the work of other students or authors.

Signature: Name: Reynaldo Garnanda Student Number: 13466596

In this era, the amount of consultant or management consulting firms are enormous and making
it a competitive market. Therefore, companies or individual will need to strive to engage or
maintain their clients. There have been many key drivers that influence a successful or effective

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Key Driver of Value Creation In The Consultant‐Client Relationship

client-consultant relationship. By understand and applying these key drivers will benefit the
firm/consultant in the competitive market.

The first key driver to success in the client-consultant relationship is to put the client first.
McKinsey company, one of the most successful consulting firm, is always put first an
important hierarchy: client, firm, you (Raisel, 1999 p.127). It explains that you must commit
that the client’s problem is your problem and their goal is your goal. In my experience, my
team tried to empathise toward the client, so we will understand the key problem that they are
facing not just having a fixed set of questions during the meet up with them and will result in
the best solution.

The second key driver is communication. The unsuccessful client-consultant relationship is

commonly triggered by the lack of communication between the client and consultant (Chelliah,
Niklova and Davis, n.d.). Both parties must have the ability to listen and communicate clearly
and seamlessly. Aside from communication skill, collaboration and engagement are also the
key factors in successful communication. Client team and consultants must work together, or
everything will not work at all. So, the client will also need to help by contributing to
collaboration. Afterwards, the consultant must ensure to engage with the client in the process.
For example, our team, when work with the UTS SOUL collaborate effectively through
communicate through email and set a schedule for a meeting. UTS SOUL also helps us by
giving informations that are needed and give feedback that will improve our understanding and
the outcome.

The third key driver is integrity and honesty. According to (Handley et al.; 2006; Kumar et al.,
2000; Bobrow, 1998 cited in Chelliah, Niklova and Davis, n.d.) integrity and honesty involved
in the success of the client-consultant relationship. This issue discusses that consultant
sometimes is tempted only to tell the good news. Hence, the core idea of a consultant’s
integrity is to prioritise the client’s need by being honest in any decision and situation even if it
is the worst news to the client. For instance, my team value this to be our core principle before
the project begins because we believe that even though this factor is easy to do but it never can
be neglected as in the long term it will destruct the client because of the not-fit solution and also
ruin our reputation. Therefore, when we conducted research and found out that most of the
UTS students have never heard of UTS SOUL, we still relay this information to them. Also, we
told them explicitly our project out of scope such as detailed implementation, financial analysis,
our capabilities, etc.

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Key Driver of Value Creation In The Consultant‐Client Relationship

The last key driver is trust. Trust between consultant and client will generate value in business.
This explains that the customer must be willing to be open or tell their vulnerability to
consultant and trust them to help the mishandle situation (Chelliah, Niklova and Davis, n.d.)
From my experience, this key driver must be implemented as a consultant need customer’s trust
to open the key information and collaboration.

In conclusion, by implementing these four key drivers will help the consultant to be successful
in client-consultant relationship and indeed make a positive value creation. In addition,
successfully implemented these drivers will differentiate us to the competitors as the client will
likely to stay or even engage more as we are not just getting the job done/transactional
relationship but make a transformational relationship.

References

Chelliah, J., Niklova, N. and Davis, D. n.d., Gaining the Competitive Edge: The Key to
Successful Client Consultant Relationship, pp.3, 6, viewed 24 October 2019,
<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f0f8/fcb006c28b70c18a945ec231b365c332ee07.pdf>.

Rasiel, E. 1999, The McKinsey way, McGraw-Hill, New York, p. 127.