| Say you're some business, government agency, or whatever. You mainly focus on one or few core things (the product, or service you're providing). Suddenly you face change, maybe the markets are changing, or tech has come a long way - but in any case, it is in something which is either outside your area of expertise, or you don't have the resources to do it yourself. So instead of hiring N people to do that one thing, you pay external people to do it for you. This is especially attractive in agencies where you have budgets to consider, can't just hire workers on a whim, and where firing workers can be equally difficult. That's where consulting firms come in. Most big consulting firms tend to be huge, and have expert networks all over the world - so there's a decent likelihood they'll have someone that have knowledge in the problem you're looking to get solved. And they hire smart enough people that will toil away. In a good scenario the consultants will have interviewed you, taken a deep dive look into your organization, analyzed the data, and either answered out your problem, or laid out exactly what you need to solve that problem. Usually on the strategy side. For the implementation itself, you can either go to step 1 and hire people to do it, or hire some other consulting agency to actually do the implementation work. That's at least the ideal situation. Sometimes consultants are just hired to rubber stamp controversial leadership decisions, and to back up things that leadership can't get internal backing for. |