Design methodology in management consulting

In dit proefschrift staat de studie van bedrijfskundige ontwerppraktijken centraal, in het bijzonder in het domein van het organisatie-advieswerk. De probleemstelling is: Welke beargumenteerd productieve strategieën hanteren competente organisatie-adviseurs om bedrijfskundige ontwerpen te creëren?Deze vraag wordt beantwoord in vier stappen. Eerst wordt een theoretisch raamwerk geconstrueerd bestaande uit een schets van de ontwikkeling van de bedrijfskundige ontwerpliteratuur, een achtergrondperspectief over hoe de wereld in elkaar zit waarin ontwerpers leven en werken, en een vocabulaire om ontwerppraktijken en praktijkgebaseerde methodologie te kunnen beschrijven. De tweede stap is het karakteriseren van het domein waarbinnen ontwerppraktijken bestudeerd worden: het organisatie-advieswerk. De derde stap is de empirische exploratie van bedrijfskundige ontwerppraktijken, waarvoor een mix van kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve methoden gebruikt is, te weten een enquete onder Nederlandse adviseurs en een serie diepte-interviews met 24 zeer goede organisatie-adviseurs, die op basis van de enqueteresultaten geselecteerd zijn. In deze empirische studie worden de praktijken van adviseurs geëxploreerd, gebaseerd op het theoretisch raamwerk dat in de eerste stap is geconstrueerd. Een belangrijk aandachtspunt in deze exploratie geldt de eventuele rol van stappenplannen, met de bedoeling om de uitgangsdiagnose van dit onderzoek te testen en verder uit te werken, en om de daadwerkelijke rol van stappenplannen in ontwerppraktijken te achterhalen. De vierde en laatste stap in het onderzoek is het formuleren van productieve ontwerpstrategieën

Capturing the competence of management consulting work

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to assess whether the effort of consulting firms and branch organizations to establish a shared and standardized methodology as a means to professionalize consulting and as a standard for training is possible and sensible. - \ud \ud Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted among Dutch management consultants, which explored their ways of working and their ways of learning. - \ud \ud Findings: The study shows that efforts to develop a shared and standardized phase-model methodology do not seem to be effective. Instead of following phase-models, consultants appear to be improvising bricoleurs, tailoring their ways of working to specific situations, and using broad, heterogeneous and partly implicit repertoires, which are built through mainly through action-learning. This requires another kind of methodology and another kind of training. - \ud \ud Research limitations/implications: The article gives a general direction for the development of a consulting methodology and the education of consultants. Further research on consulting practices and repertoires is necessary to explore this direction. - \ud \ud Practical implications: The paper concludes that the value of phase-models as a standard is limited. Therefore, branch organizations, consulting firms and corporate universities should not focus their professionalization and training activities on these standardized methods. - \ud \ud Originality/value: Little work has been done yet on the relation between professionalization, methods, and training in management consulting, and no earlier publication has studied this topic quantitatively

Coping with chaos in change processes

In their efforts to change organizations, managers and change consultants are time and again confronted with the limited controllability of organizations, the complexity and indeterminacy of change processes and the uncertain and ambiguous effects of their actions. In short, they are confronted with chaos. Some managers and consultants try to enhance their (illusion of) control over organizations by attempting to reduce chaos, while others accept and embrace chaos and base their change practice on it. This article focuses on the second group. Based on a study of literature and a series of interviews with experienced change consultants, a typology is developed, in which an enlightened modern, an ironic, and a postmodern way of coping with chaos in change processes is elaborated. The typology may help change consultants and managers with the development of their way of working and the articulation of their professional identity

Configurations Driving NPD Performance Fit with Market Demands and Time Constraints

The research reported in this paper is aimed at developing knowledge on organizing NPD systems to optimize their contribution to performance. To this end, a systems approach to fit is used to explain the context-structure-performance relationships for NPD performance, specifically in terms of fit with market demands of the product concept and fit with time constraints of the development process. From a sample of 164 US firms, the top 15 % performers in terms of both fit with market demands and fit with time constraints have been identified. An optimized ‘Ideal Profile’ for the organization of NPD systems, formed by a consistent pattern of: NPD Process, NPD Project Structure and Management, Innovation Climate, and NPD Goal Setting and Portfolio Management, followed from the analysis of the NPD configuration of these top performers. For the calibration sample (the other 85%) significant deviation from the ideal profile on all elements of the configuration was found, the correlations between NPD Performance Fit with Market Demands and Fit with Time Constraints and total Euclidean distance are also significant. Overall, these results provide evidence for the proposition that (1) new product success is a function of a set of NPD development system decisions and (2) to truly understand the impact of those decisions, they must be considered as a holistic system.\ud The contribution of this research is in the empirical validation of the internal consistency of an ideal organizational profile for NPD systems achieving both a high NPD performance in terms of market acceptance of their new products as well in terms of the satisfactory level of the development times of those products. By also examining ideal profiles for each of these NPD performance dimensions separately, the conflicting demands created by multiple performance metrics are highlighted as well as the organizational trade-offs necessary for optimal performance. In terms of managerial implications, this also gives direction for organizational redesign to firms either wanting to maximize their product concept (Fit with Market Demands) or development process (Fit with Time Constraints) performance