Function
The functions of consulting services are commonly broken down into eight task categories. Consultants can function as bridges for information and knowledge, and that external consults can provide these bridging services more economically than client firms themselves.
Marvin Bower, McKinsey's long-term director, has mentioned the benefits of a consultant's externality, that they have varied experience outside the client company.
Consultants have specialised skills on tasks that would involve high internal coordination costs for clients, such as organization-wide changes or the implementation of information technology. In addition, because of economies of scale, their focus and experience in gathering information worldwide and across industries renders their information search less costly than for clients.
Read more about this topic: Performance Consulting
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“If the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)