In The Riptide Of Changing Objectives: Reciprocity In Consultant-Client Interaction

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the reciprocal nature of the client-consultant relationship in management consulting. Although different aspects of the client-consultant relationship have been addressed - including interaction between client and consultant (Fincham, 1999; Pellegrinelli, 2002; Werr and Styhre, 2002), the multitude of roles of both the client and the consultant during the consulting process (Hislop, 2002; Kaarst-Brown, 1999; Schein, 1987; Williams, 2001) and the knowledge transfer or creation during a consultancy process. (Todorova, 2004, Handley et al., 2007; Ko et al., 2005) - the research still lacks proper descriptions of the process of interaction in management consulting projects. In this paper we show with the aid of case study analysis how the client affects the final outcomes of a management consultancy process and how external processes and events have an impact on the outcome of the consultation process. The study describes a changing event path, during which an IT outsourcing project was affected by decisions by the client company's management, its board, and the suggestions from an external consultant. In addition, the paper discusses the consulting project success criteria.

Design/methodology/approach - In this paper we build on a single case study of an internationalizing Finnish SME technology company. The case provides a design enabling us to examine longitudinally and in rich detail the changing goals and directions of a consulting project, affected both by the consultant's and the client's input in knowledge creation. In the case study we relied on multiple sources of data: of in-house memos, emails, interviews, project reports, meeting notes, consulting evaluations, and field observations. The collected data in this study was analyzed according to case study protocol (Yin, 1989) with a connection to the explorative and grounded theory approaches, in which data collection, analysis, and theory stand in reciprocal relationship with each other. (Straus & Corbin 1990, p. 23)

Originality/value - This paper adds to the existing research by showing how the client and the consultant interact and how the external unexpected and not-controllable factors affect the whole consulting project. Secondly, the case shows that the client problem can change during the project and the consultant has to adapt to the changing client's problem and criteria. Thirdly, the case shows how different types of clients in the consulting projects actually have different goals and unclear or hidden agendas. This widens the view on client-consultant relationship in existing theory on knowledge intensive client work (cf. Sturdy et al., 2009; Ciampi, 2007; Todorova, 2004; Pellegrinelli, 2002; Bitner et al., 1997) and especially in the reciprocal client-consultant processes. (cf. Nikolova & Devinney, 2012)

Practical implications - The proposed results of the analysis provides a framework, which allows the clients of management consultants better design, brief and guide the consultancy processes. From the consultant's perspective, the results of this study contribute to a view which encourages to design facilitation methods, which strengthen the need for understanding the multiplicity of client's goals.