Have a good weekend!

Really odd how people say that on a Thursday morning. I always wonder what this sort of wish is all about. Probably just a manner of speaking, but then...the fact that on the fourth out of five work days people start referring to the end of the work week suggests that what's keeping them alive is the thought that the drag of work will soon be over, for a little bit at least.

The really worrying thing is that this sort of message actually does cheer me up. 'Almost done!', I think when the guy in the coffee shop wishes me a good weekend on Thursday at ten a.m., fully aware though I am that I have another twenty or so working hours ahead of me before I'm off duty. Sort of suggests my job situation is less than ideal after all.

Implementation Dread

Now that we're in the last phase of our project, the question is whether we'll get to do the implementation too. It's not always the case that theory and practice are kept separate in this way, but in the case of our current project they were, maybe to give the client a chance to get rid of us if we didn't live up to expectations. Actually it may not always be such a bad idea not to let the theory guys do the implementing: top-notch consultants typically are much better at analysing and finding out what's wrong than they are at fixing the problem. Also they are so ridiculously expensive.

But our partner is drooling whenever the topic of implementation comes up. He wants it, and badly. The team, less so. Much less so. In fact, I can already imagine my colleagues' frenzied attempt to convince staffing that really the implementation phase counts as a new case which is in desperate need of fresh blood. In which case the staffing merry-go-round will creak into noisy action once again. See below.

Staffing

And off we are again to the Provinces. Even though consulting is famous for sending its employees wherever the customer may be (and it doesn't matter whether it's Sydney, Australia or Sydney, OH), not every project is as inconveniently located as this. Hence, on Sunday nights it's hard to suppress the thought, Why Me?

Yeah, why? Ask staffing. Towards the end of each project there's this placement routine familiar to everyone in the business. The nice person from staffing calls and asks, very nicely, what project you'd like to work on next. If you have any consulting savvy at all, you'll start by pointing out that a) the last three assignments were in places no educated person could find on any map, b)the topic had nothing, but nothing whatever to do with your preferences and expertise, and c) the promised four weeks turned into four months each time. Staffing person will say, with a voice dripping of honey and goodwill, that she (in my case) knows and that she'll find you something really good this time by way of compensation.

Great, you say cunningly, I'd like something in consumer goods, how about media. About six weeks, so that I can take my holiday in time. And ideally in (wherever you're located).

You'll like this, says staffing person sweetly. I've got exactly the thing for you. Steel industry. Michigan. About four months, but possibly half a year.

How's that got anything to do with what I want?, you scream.

It's all I have, says staffing person. Start next Monday. Sorry.

Then reactions vary. Some suck it up and suffer in silence. Some keep bothering staffing, every day, weeks after the project has started. Some lodge a complaint with a partner. Some, after too many experiences of this sort, decide to quit. The threat of which has, if the person in case was good, in some rare instances magically produced that desired media project. Or so rumour has it. I haven't seen it happening myself.

Musings

It's been a short week, in a fun place, crowned by a halfway successful presentation: not too bad, all things considered. And the team didn't have to go to Nowhere Land for once. Makes you realize how big a disadvantage the consultant's constant travelling actually is. And I'm single (sigh). Imagine what happens if you are in a stable relationship (or, worse, have a family). Your kids WILL go to that nice private school. But they won't have a very clear idea of what the person who pays for it looks like. Not such an appealing prospect. And I think it's a main reason why management consultants last an average of something under three years on the job.

But three years is still a long time, so why do people do it? Obviously, the money's good (though not as good as it once was), one learns a lot, one is in an ideal position to eventually land a cushy position in management. But the main motivator for consultants in the top firms is something quite different: no ordinary industry job offers quite the same mix of excitement, speed, variety of challenges, and eclectic assortment of colleagues. After you've tasted this, almost everything else will seem stale by comparison. And so, despite a lot of moaning, we soldier on.

A Bit of the Good Life

Since yesterday's Steering Committee Meeting took place in the big fun city where our client's headquarters are located, and since my firm has an office midtown, we decided to work from there today. So we went out last night, pretty extensively actually, enjoying a spot of nightlife, and all showed up rather under the weather this morning. I have to say that it IS fun going out with my team. You get to know your coworkers really really well on an assignment like mine, and if you click with them you do connect. I've said that before, but junior consultants can actually be very fun people. Our PL, the one who was in tears last week, came out too. She has definitely relaxed a bit now that that meeting is over. We'll see how long the peace lasts.

Done!

One thing I still haven't quite gotten used to in my three consulting years is stepping in front of top management - and that means, people who often will have spent successful decades in a business I'd never looked at prior to the project - and telling them what they ought to do. It always amazes me that they are willing to listen. I can't possibly have anything approaching their experience or inside-out knowledge of the company. What do they think I can contribute that they couldn't provide themselves?

If you've ever been on a big consultancy's website, you know the official answer: out-of-the-box thinking. A fresh perspective. Sharp analytic intelligence. The latest b-school savvy.

There might be some cases, not very many, in which this isn't entirely false. Sometimes a company's top brass just isn't very capable. Sometimes they are so deeply caught up in their stuff that they don't see the bigger picture. Sometimes they have vested interests. But mostly our services are useful (if they are) for different kinds of reasons. What we do, mostly, is either of two things. We may spell out inconvenient truths that are generally known but that nobody else is in a position to defend. Or we simply provide short-term managerial capacity. Not very glamorous, but that's what it boils down to. And that's why these guys listen to us.

They were fairly quiet at our steering committee meeting today. No gushing compliments, but nobody got shot down either. I think we did okay.

Last Minute Antics

Steering Committee Meeting tomorrow. A gathering of fifteen client VIPs who want to see whether their hard-earned cash has bought them results, and who won't be shy to express their disappointment if they think it hasn't. It's the third such meeting on the case and the penultimate one before we go into implementation (if we do). So they will be expecting pretty solid progress. And nice slides. In the old days, the consultant drew up a more-or-less legible hand-written draft, and the team assistant was left to make a slide out of it. Officially we are still allowed to work in this way, but very few of the younger people do. By the time one's produced a draft that makes sense and has explained it to the assistant, one has pretty much designed the thing on Power Point oneself. So now the assistant's job is more about constructing an optically coherent presentation out of the various modules' contributions and making sure it all conforms to the company's guidelines.

Visual coherence is one thing, content-related consistency quite another. It's really not easy, in a big project with a variety of modules, to produce a tidy argument witout loose ends. We've had several meetings during which we tried to string it all together. Tomorrow it'll become clear whether we succeeded.

Of course we didn't get our stuff done in time for the staff in the print room, who go home at six, to do our photocopying. That means we're in for a few hours of xeroxing fun before bed. Actually that's not too bad. I've seen projects where panic-stricken associates were loading red-hot presentations straight from the printer into cabs that then raced straight to the client's headquarters. You thrive under pressure? Then this is your job.