Consulting: space and time

By Fiona Czerniawska.

I recently spent the day at PwC’s Experience Center in Miami. 

The Center itself is at least as good as ones we’ve seen elsewhere (personally, I was delighted to see more potted plants, and fewer soft toys and beanbags). Most can be traced back to Capgemini’s pioneering Accelerated Solutions Centres, now more than a decade old. It’s clearly a model that continues to work well for clients who find the different environment helps facilitate discussion, taking their employees out of their accustomed boxes. 

More interesting were the working spaces (rooms would almost certainly be the wrong word) around the Center itself, acquired by PwC when it bought BGT, a digital consultancy, in 2013. These have been designed to encourage collaboration, within the client team (each client gets its own ‘home’ a dedicated space), between the client team and PwC, and between PwC team members. Nice but not new, I hear you say? If by collaboration we mean getting straight-laced consultants to work with trendy digital types, I’d agree with you. We’ve seen plenty of other firms struggle with this problem, and transplanting people from one environment to another is the most common solution.

What struck me here was the fact that the people who’d been part of BGT said the way they work has also changed. It turns out that digital consultancies relied on a linear process, just as much as conventional ones: Person A would go and interview clients, then write up their comments and hand it over to Person B as a set of requirements; Person B would create the webpages (or whatever) based on these requirements, then pass it on to Person C to… What’s different now is that everyone is in the room (sorry, space) at the same time, so Person A doesn’t have to write a report, Person B can hear what clients are saying directly, and Person C probably isn’t even needed. Apply the same approach to the cohorts of straight-laced consultants, and the whole process becomes simpler, better, and more efficient.

But if that’s so great – and clients clearly love this – why are we still consulting in the conventional fashion?  Why isn’t every office, every project and every team in every firm organised like this? Because it’s clearly not just about the space; it’s not about putting people together in the same room, but at the same time. And that’s the underlying challenge consulting firms face. Of course, it's one increasingly embraced by digital specialists who are using agile techniques to put collaboration at the heart of project management. But that approach may be particularly hard for firms to align with their traditional business models.

The consulting industry has always been about time: it’s how it makes money, for heaven’s sake. So time has been tightly controlled; the more important you are, the more your time is going to be divided up between multiple projects; time isn’t yours to control. Getting people to work, not just together but simultaneously, on a project is a nightmare: it’s so much easier to keep every cell in the organisation separate. Genuine collaboration – the kind that clients want and value – isn’t just a matter of having a new space, but breaking the tyranny of timesheets and utilisation.