Disruption: “Reinvent your own Consultancy Business Model!”

The new consultancy practice in terms of vision will be mainly driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This Revolution consists of 4 parallel revolutions, an Automation-, 3D-Manufacturing-, Circular- and Green Revolution. This combination speeds up even more the (exponential) technology developments.

The fourth industrial revolution connects the Cyber world with the Physical world, the white collar worker with the blue collar worker, Business Processes + Office Automation with the Operations Processes + Factory Automation. This connected world is maximal enabled by IoT/M2M, driving new business models and services with high added value. New trusted, secure, heavily encrypted ecosystems will support continuous, development and delivery of individual products and services for individual customers.
Future products and services will be maximum software oriented and so exponentially scalable. Control and use of the products and services will run as much as possible over smartphones and apps. From this type of maximum software oriented products and services a virtual shadow is created for example to execute real time on-line updates and preventive maintenance during the whole lifecycle of the product. Big data, data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence play an increasingly important role. This will also lead to possible “life time” engagement of individual customers, staff, suppliers and partners.

The current exponential technology developments need a totally different approach to consultancy. From a sleek, strong detailed approach based on methods & techniques, especially driven by (staff department) top-down thinking and limited execution power (a more coaching role), to a much more agile, autonomous, short cyclic, on big data, dashboards, and experiments based (project) approach driven by bottom-up thinking, and much attention for execution where the customer and the consultancy company are business partners, doing business together and taking entrepreneurial risks together. With organic multidisciplinary self-managing teams, which act more applied than fundamental. This type of consultancy will be much more focused on the reuse of previously elsewhere developed models, and the use of realistic KPI’s based on big data, data analytics, machine learning and proprietary automated tools. This approach should also bring an exponential acceleration in the execution of consultancy activities (“Release early & Release often“).

In the near future consultancy companies have to change their working methods to survive on the long run:
Active community thinking and intensive working on the own community, creating a so-called “pull effect”.
Acquisition of new projects (and customers) is maximum supported by targeted communication regarding executed projects
Explicit attention to staffing on demand and great attention to those who once have worked with us in one of our projects;
New product and service development will take place much more active in our community;
Actively bind, fascinate and involve (potential) customers and staff-on-demand in our community (“life time engagement”);
Consultants are next to top-down working on vision, agile bottom-up executors; they take risks together with the customer;
Consultancy companies have to act more like an internet startup and must be willing to cannibalize themselves (partially), to respond quickly to new trends, and help to aggressive redistribute resources;
The disruptive changes in the Consultancy Business Model will be especially in the areas of customers, partners, staffing, service development, new business models. And how consultancy is agile, result driven and entrepreneurial executed by extremely inspiring consultants with a fail-proof image (“Inspiration Engineer: craftsmanship = mastership”).

Such new entrepreneurial consultancy boutiques will have a dedicated, very balanced, multi-disciplinary hardcore team of 8-12 top-consultants. For project execution staffing-on-demand is key.
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