Consultancy

Consultancy

To consult is to ask someone for advice. He is a one who tells person what he already knows. Process of consulting has roots on history as well. In Mahabharata Krishna was consulting all pandvas. Also we all know Akbar's dependency on Birbl's advice.

There are two kind of consulting. One of them is professional consulting. Other is non professional. People do professional consulting to earn money. To consult on something one needs experience. That is why most of the consultants are very old. Also experience is not the only key to become successful consultant. He should be able to understand the problem. Find the root cause. Follow the structured approach to solve the problem. He should frame recommendations in crisp manner. Doctors, lawyers fall in the above category. In non professional consulting people provide consulting free of cost. Many consultants do it for NGO's or non profit organizations.

It is also a lucrative career for retired professionals. They can bank on there experience.

A would be management consultant must posses certain qualities. He should put clients' interest first. He should follow situations accurately and to develop sound solutions. He should be active listener. He should possess clarity of expression in verbally and in writing. A consultant often works with senior management. But sometimes he has to interact with employee at all levels. His status is equal to those working in senior management posts. There is an increasing amount of overseas work with assignments. This helps consultants to gain first-hand experience of international business. Thus knowledge or aptitude to learn foreign language is an asset.

Consultant is required to work on wide range of activities. Devising business strategies involve long run planning and re-organization of company's structure. It also deals with rationalization of services and products. Manufacturing and business services involve review of layout of various departments. Marketing involve business forecasting and organization of retail and wholesale outlets. Financial control involves profit planning, revenue budgeting and administrative arrangements. Human resource management involves advising on personnel policy and industry relations. It also deals with manpower training and job evaluation. Environmental management includes urban and regional development planning. It deals with ecological and sociological studies for encouragement of quality life-style. Quality management involves setting of policy, strategy and processes.

Shareholder/promoter appoints directors on company's board as a consultant. The director is required to make an independent judgment. He must exercise his powers honestly and for their proper purpose. He must not permit company entering into transaction involving his personal interest. He must act fairly between company's members. He must not use any property, information of company for his benefit.

He must exercise the skill, care and diligence.

The M&A market are red hot now. Investment banks acts as a consultant in this process. Standard Charted was consulting Mittals during Arcelor takeover. Also they advice investors on equity trading.

Because of technological advances consulting has become more feasible. These days search engines also provide consultation. Google and Yahoo are most widely used search engines for this purpose. They are having huge database of information .With help of advanced searching algorithms searching has become fast. Consultants are also making use of video conferencing. It is heavily used by doctors. To ease the job of consultant DBMS system was deployed. It has many advantages over legacy file system. One of them is efficient management of files. Example of DBMS is Oracle 11 I. But still processing time required for huge data is bottleneck. Also it is