Research shows that the primary motivation for organizations that engage a management consulting firm is to receive customized solutions to their problems. Additionally, providing information is another frequent reason organizations seek outside consulting.
Among a sea of more than 1 million competing firms, the management consultants that stand out are the ones who can prove their value with data-informed strategies. That’s where micro-information comes in.
This blog explains the types of micro-information that can benefit management consulting firms and illustrates how technologies like workforce management software can speed the data collection process.
What Is Micro-Information in Management Consulting?
Micro-information refers to detailed data that can help leaders make better business decisions. It can help consultants conclude faster, identify trends within large datasets, and identify untapped opportunity gaps more quickly.
Examples of micro-information that can be tracked within businesses include:
- Quantified employee focus and productivity levels
- Resource allocation and utilization trends
- Detailed turnover rates and costs
- The cost of productivity
- Robust time tracking
- Real-time task/project/program tracking that shows where time is being spent across the organization
- Detailed client engagement tracking
- Cost modeling
- Proactive (versus reactive) tools
Access to tracked data as your client’s business operates provides invaluable information to support organizational strategy and operations recommendations.
How Workforce Management Software Benefits Management Consultants
New technologies modernized for an increasingly blended hybrid, remote, and onsite workforce make it easy to track all of this data and more with minimal effort. By utilizing workforce management software, management consultants can quickly provide additional value to their clients, enabling your firm to take on additional clients, increase revenue, and enhance your firm’s brand.
Continuous Data Collection
The first step in most management consulting partnerships is to identify the client’s goals, and to get to know the client and its operations inside and out. This process can take months without practical tracking tools and may require copious amounts of stakeholder interviews, data / document collection, and subsequent analysis.
Workforce management software continuously collects human capital, project management, resource gaps, and more data. This makes it easy for management consulting firms to get to know their clients better and define the problem more quickly.
A client may think they know the problem, but it could be a symptom of a more significant issue. Ongoing data collection provides access to the micro-information needed to confirm the root cause.
Enhanced Business Analytics
Once the necessary data is collected, management consulting firms are responsible for making sense of it. Workforce management systems have built-in business analytics tools to analyze the gathered data and turn it into digestible information for your client.
These data analytics tools make it easy to visualize company data quickly to create a narrative, discover strengths, trends, and opportunities, and generate solution-focused recommendations.
Better-Informed Decisions
Despite the abundance of data available, nearly half of all business decisions are based on gut feelings rather than data. The biggest reason for this is simply a lack of timely, accurate, and complete information.
These tools provide your management consulting firm an even broader opportunity to provide value for clients that can continue to build even after your transactional work ends. This can make your firm more competitive against other firms that rely primarily on past experiences and general best practices, and it can provide overall solutions your clients need.
Improved Scalability
If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s that large organizations need to have scalability and sustainability strategies & tactical tools in place to handle market unknowns. Combining resource allocation, business forecasting, and advanced data analytics tools can secure your clients’ ability to scale and withstand the next crisis.
Increased Understanding of an Organization’s People
For many organizations, people are the number one asset in achieving success. Your client could have a great business growth strategy, but it won’t matter much if their people keep leaving.
Workforce management software comes with tools to help provide insights into a company’s people analytics. It can develop a work-life balance percentage, a productivity numeral, and an attendance profile for each employee to identify who may be at risk of burnout easily. Strategies & tactics can then be created around the teams that need the most support to reduce spending on recruiting and hiring new team members.
Increase Value for Your Management Consulting Clients With the Right Tools
Management consulting firms that can’t prove and measure their value for personalized client solutions will inevitably fall behind firms that can. Workforce management software can help your firm achieve better outcomes and a reputation for high-quality, well-informed work.
coAmplifi offers workforce management solutions tailored to consulting firms. These solutions can help you start landing more management consulting clients and better fulfill client expectations. Schedule your demo now!
