Unquantifiable impact of Management Consultants
Essential benefits of any given action in business need to be quantifiable and identifiable in a meaningful way. Many forms of such quantification may include cost-benefit analysis, statistical modeling, profit and return on investment analysis, or other individualized methodology to measure. However, there is more to particular actions that numbers can identify or meaningfully quantify.
Many times, additional impact factors contribute to overall organizational viability, success, and culture. Those factors may include personal and organizational psyche, cross-functional information flow and cooperation, perception of volubility, perception of integration, as well as internal and external inflating of individual and/or team egos.
In management consulting, one of the most unquantifiable issues is the ego factor. Essentially deploying a management consultant or a management consulting firm has a negative stigma by implying explicitly or implicitly that a failure has caused the interference of an external third party that provides services and expertise that was otherwise either not available at all internally or if available at all, it was not sufficient to be relied on. Hence, implies a diminished prestige of internal teams or individuals.
But nothing could be farther away from the truth. Essentially the deployment of external management consultants or any other consultant for this matter implies that organizational expertise and safeguards have worked so effectively in recognizing potential points of improvement that a timely and effective decision to add more resources has been made. Additionally, deploying external resources and expertise to improve effectiveness and efficiency is in no way a degradation of internal expertise or capabilities, rather than a practical proof of such massive and substantial awareness and proficiency to recognize and deploy additional resources to maximize potential outcomes.
Yet many small and mid-size companies still struggle with stigmas that have no validity or impact on actual success. Ultimately, the decision to seek external resources may or may not be dependent on internal capabilities rather than the necessity to seek the ultimate efficiency and effectiveness by all means necessary.
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