As for PowerPoint decks, a lot of times were putting together a presentation for some executive. Usually it’s summarizing our findings or pitching some solution or whatever. It’s seems like we spend a lot of time sending them up and down the chain with each management layer adding their own redline edits and having lower levels interpret the changes.
In terms of what we REALLY do I’m actually not clear what the consultants were meant to be doing in some of the examples others provided. Like what were they there to actually recommend?
Most of the PowerPoint decks I’ve worked on were for a presentation to management, too. And yes, we edited them. But editing a PowerPoint deck is like editing a novel. “How can i tell this story effectively?”
But we didn’t do a lot of decks by committee…typically, someone was directly responsible for messaging and would call out what they needed. Also, our executive staff meeting had a deck-size limit of eight slides…not unexpectedly, people dug deep and found the remarkable ability to message concisely.
I was only on one project with project management, and it was a disaster. But not because of project management. The PMs correctly showed the project was late, but the line management refused to admit it until it was way late.
It cost the company billions of bucks, but I got out before it really hit the fan.
I remember going through it in the late 1990s when the “quality movement” was in vogue. I was given the title “quality engineer,” which I hated. What a colossal waste of time and money.
Ours was an in-house adaptation of “lean management”. And i won’t say that every element of it was worthless. In particular, changing the IT model from “you must completely specify the final product before we can begin, and if you made a mistake in specifications, tough shit, maybe we can review that in 10 years” to “let’s make a minimally viable system and plan to improve it” was mostly a win. But IT was a fairly small part of the company, and “continuous improvement” was a fairly small fraction of the “transformation”.
Some of what was implemented was actively counter-productive, and the amount of time we spent on training for it was a massive waste of time. And the head of HR, who squandered vast quantities of company resources on that boondoggle, is still there, i believe.
Lean Management and Continuous Improvement is intended for Manufacturing. Scrum is intended for Software. They work. It’s when pinheads try to rigidly shoehorn them into other disciplines that things go sideways.
So often when something like this happens, there’s an insistence on cultural change, as well as a failure to recognize that more technical disciplines could likely skip a lot of that training if you just explain what’s happening. One of my groups (~50 people) went through something like that, and the functional payoff was great - we had a series of quarterly processes coordinated across multiple countries, with a bunch of handoffs in and out of function, and we cut a big part of that work from 5 days to 2 (mainly by documenting workflows/handoffs and making signoffs public & timebound) and reduced a lot of errors, freeing up almost a full-time person to go to work on a list of updates/improvements we’d put aside. It was really good, but it would have been great if we hadn’t had to all go through training aimed at non-technical staff.
Sometimes the company President gets a bug up their ass that this is “the next best thing”, and the head of HR doesn’t have the operational understanding to rebuff it. I’m not saying that makes things great, that’s just how it goes.
Companies and their various managers have developed a mindset that they have to constantly be inventing, disrupting, trying new things, cutting costs, all that shit. So I think it tends to lead to this constant churn of not only exploring new management fads, but entire cottage industries springing up to support and generate revenue from advising, consulting, and coaching those fads.
I don’t think it’s completely fair to blame management consultants for “not knowing your business” or “transformative projects that just waste everyone’s time”. I think a lot of it falls on corporate management as part of a larger “enshitification” of Corporate America and work in general. Remember that consultants just give advice and expertise and a steady stream of workers to outsource to. Management ultimately makes all the decisions and provides the budget.
A lot of people in this thread have described working for companies that seem to have their shit together. I think that’s nice if you can find a place like that to work for an extended period of time. I’ve worked for a few firms or clients that were actually like that, but for one reason or another didn’t last.
Most of my experience in Corporate America, has been observing one Dilbert-esq shit show after another. I’d say much of that has to do with working as a consultant on what are by nature transactional projects. And studies have shown that up to 70% of projects fail in some way. But I’ve worked at a few regular companies and in many ways it’s worse.
My impression is that no one REALLY knows what the fuck they are doing. Companies constantly reorg. People change roles or switch companies. Companies hire armies of consultants to do actual work. Consultants who do the work are usually jr people who may have never done it before while the senior experts mostly just sell. I talk to a lot of people who can’t even explain what their fucking company does or what their job is.
To me that’s a lot of people in jobs they’ve never done before and a lot of institutional knowledge that leaves .
That said, even at the banks and tech companies I work for, they have people who have been working there for years, even decades. I can’t figure out what they do or how they even managed to get hired. They seem dumb to me. Like I have to explain their own job to them like they are a small child so they can then explain what’s going on to their boss. Not all of them. There are always a few who seem to know their shit.
Of course no one can let on how dumb they are or how little they know. I think that’s why corporate spends so much time obsessing over some bullshit minutiae in a PowerPoint deck. People actually looking to get stuff done don’t care if the requirements are written on the back of a napkin.
Maybe it’s different at companies that don’t need to hire consultants.
LOL Obviously some things you need a bit more rigor for.
I had a client last year where I had to cobble together a master Excel spreadsheet to track thousands of regulatory projects the bank was working on in response to the almost half billion in fines they were already paying. It was just meant to be an initial snapshot of data manually extracted from several project management tracking systems so we understand who owned what and could plan a larger strategy for addressing all of them. I did not intend for the bank to make my spreadsheet a “data warehouse” they would link all sorts of other spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks to as their SOP going forward.
It shouldn’t matter what the companies do, should it? Like how do you even get the job without knowing at least what industry the company is in?
One woman I overheard in a bar worked for a company (in sales operations apparently) that made various back office software products for banks. That company happened to be a client of mine.
On my last client I was a bit annoyed that one of the jr consultants couldn’t explain what the project actually was. In fairness, the client mostly seemed to have him create high level Powerpoint updates on a group of projects she “owned”. What seemed odd to me was the client seemed totally disconnected from any of them. Separate PMOs and project manager teams actually ran the projects. We just sort of collected summaries every week so she could pass them upwards. But this woman didn’t seem like she had much involvement in any decisions related to the projects or the overall running of them.