Management Consulting by Mr. Kalyanaraman

Mr. Kalyanaraman , Management Consultant

Mr. Kalyanaraman has 9 years of experience as a Management Consultant and is currently on his way to take up an assignment at the FIFA World Cup Business Process management team in Qatar, where he’d be planning on the infrastructure development and restructuring plans after the WC.

Here are the interesting snippets from the session.

So what really is management consulting?

“A management consultant is someone who looks at your watch and tells you the time.”

It is divided into two types, Strategic and Implementing. He also spoke about how the internal controls(set of procedures that are embedded in the process to ensure that nothing intercepts the process) form a part of consulting. Three major tasks of a consultant are

1. ·        Developing Policies and Procedures-helping develop HR and finance policies. And preparing the Policy statement of a company.
2. ·        Overseeing Internal Auditing-which forms a part of internal risk management.
3. ·        Compensatory Bench-marking-Comparing one company with others to know where exactly the company stands in the market. Knowing when/how to increase/cut down salary all form a part of this process.

Major challenges that a consultant faces:

·        Managing people’s expectations.

·        Knowledge about MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel and also the basics of  logical programming.

·        Assisting corporate transformation. Helping the employees of the weaker company during mergers.

·        Back-up plans and exit strategies.

·        Coming up with IMPLEMENTABLE solutions.

 Some key points to take home from the session:

·        Preparing oneself for long work hours. (18-20 hours for almost 2 years).

·        Most people are from a diverse background, so managing people’s expectations is the key.

·        Find something good? Share it.

·        Technical knowledge and people skills/networking is the key.

·        Working with uncertainty is the rule of thumb for a consultant. Ground rules are nothing but common sense.

·        The importance of branding oneself.

·        As a consultant, one cannot take decisions on behalf of the management.

He closed the session with interesting titbits from his life, one where he had to be ethical and not give in to his boss’ request and one where he was terminated for a project and wasn't paid for it.

It was an informative session overall and he ended with the saying, “Once a consultant, always a consultant.”