Why and How to Build an In-House Consulting Team

In-house strategy and consulting groups are growing in popularity, supplementing and increasingly winning business from traditional consulting firms such as McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Company. Today, many high-profile companies—Cisco, Google, IBM, Samsung, Siemens, Disney, Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank, to name a few—contain such roving consulting groups to help solve the most critical strategy and operations problems throughout the business. Internal consulting groups have a number of advantages over external firms, including a company-wide perspective, continuity into implementation, attraction of top talent to the company, higher levels of confidentiality, and greater cost-effectiveness. But building an internal consulting group is an unprecedented endeavor for many companies, and because best practices have yet to spread widely, internal consulting groups vary greatly in how they operate and the business impacts they are able to achieve.

Over the past six years, we have put in place a 30-person consulting team at EMC Information Infrastructure (EMC II) using a model we have found to be successful, winning projects away from external management consulting firms at a fraction of the cost, and with great “client” (that is to say, EMC) satisfaction. Here’s what we’ve learned about how to establish a successful internal consulting group.

Set objectives and size. Having clear objectives helps prioritize the group’s efforts and also measure success. The primary objectives in creating our team were to rein in spending on external strategy firms and to attract, train, and retain top talent in the company. Typically for an internal consulting group, we had to grow gradually as we demonstrated the quality of our work. But the key was knowing when to stop growing. We decided to cap the group’s size at 30 consultants. For a company our size, with reported revenue of $24.4 billion in 2014 and approximately 70,000 employees worldwide, this number allows us to deliver six to eight projects per quarter. Though the demand for projects often exceeds this capacity, we prefer to be able to prioritize the engagements with the highest business impact.

see more from the source: https://hbr.org/2015/09/why-and-how-to-build-an-in-house-consulting-team