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The 5 Most Popular Consulting Frameworks for Your Business
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23th January 2022A business framework assists you in analyzing your business problems and shaping your thoughts. These frameworks are valuable tools for a successful businessperson. Business analysts and strategy consultants frequently utilize these frameworks to communicate their suggestions to their customers. In strategy, business, and management studies, there are a vast number of articles, which claim that they have the best creative and valuable framework.
Nowadays, in the business world, there are top-notch business frameworks. Those frameworks are used in the business world, which we will discuss in this article.
What is consulting?
Consulting can be defined in different ways; it can solve challenges and problems that companies face (Kubr, 2002). The term consulting is used in a broad context with different meanings related to the situation. Other consultant jobs are like a business consultant, marketing consultant, software consultant, and many more. Every company faces various problems; consulting management and strategies can help them find the problem and improve their progress and profits.
What is a consulting framework?
Liu et al., 2011 describe consulting framework as a tool developed with collaboration to assist a business. Consulting frameworks allow companies to focus on the external and internal factors systemically. These frameworks help them know when and where to make changes in the system. A framework should be flexible to make changes. These frameworks contain a group of critical philosophies, which accommodate businesses to solve their problem and manage their companies more conveniently.
The benefits of using a consulting framework
A management consulting framework has been utilized to examine and help make decisions for your client and your own company.
As an example, we look into the 3 C’s Framework; this Framework assists you in creating a competitive strategy consulting Framework for your customer or can be used to design a marketing plan of social media for your business.
You can use multiple frameworks to fulfill your client’s demands. The Framework gives you a starting point for gathering data and investigation to save your time. It will help you in the future if you remember that the most substantial Framework you can use is your typical scene and your mastery. These frameworks are your time-savers, but eventually, your business vision will deliver importance to your customer.
Some popular frameworks that are used today
There are many consulting frameworks used to evaluate company performance. Following are some of the frameworks that the business industry is currently using to develop their businesses successfully.
- SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)
SWOT is defined as an analytical framework that influences strategic planning methods and techniques to assist a company in analyzing its strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O), and threats (T) (SWOT). This framework is used to assess the competition, potential, performance, and risk.
• What are you capable of?
• What different assets can you avail of?
• What things are considered as your strength by other individuals?
Weakness
• What could you do better?
• Where can you find yourself with few resources as compared to others?
• What do people think are your weaknesses?
Opportunity
• What opportunities to avail?
• From which trend can you get benefits?
• How is it possible to convert strengths into opportunities?
Threats
• What threats are harmful to you?
• What are other competitors doing?
• What risk do your weaknesses disclose to you?
- Corporation, Competition, and Customer
The 3 C’s Corporation, Competition, and Customer is a typical strategic framework. The 3C’s framework can analyze nature and external components to create economical solutions. It doesn’t matter whether it is management consultation to improve costs or technology consultation to develop or redesign infrastructure.
- McKinsey 7s Framework
The McKinsey 7S model is used to figure out and solve internal problems in an organization.
7 Elements are covered in the McKinsey 7-S Framework
• Strategy
• Structure
• Systems
• Skills
• Staff
• Style
• Shared values
- PoPorter’sive Forces
The main element in the success of a company and its customer is power. According to the PoPorter’sive Force model, you have to balance power to maintain profit and competition in your business. Here power means the forces which directly affect your business.
- MECE Framework
The MECE Framework divides the problems into subcategories to make it easier to understand and identify solutions. MECE is specifically helpful for subdividing and arranging data into a meaningful framework focused on the principle.
Which is the best consulting framework?
It is tricky to conclude which one is the best consulting framework. Each has importance concerning the scenario. Frameworks assist in solving business problems. We can’t confine one framework to a particular situation to use them as per your need, or you can use a blend of all according to the problem. There is always room for improvement in the model in the contemporary situation.
Things to consider before deciding on a consulting framework
• There is no fixed set of rules; according to the situation, you can recommend more the one framework.
• Use the best fit framework
• Do not impose a framework
• Develop hypothesis with the support of information collected through interview
• Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE)
• Pay attention to clues given by the interviewer
• Depict what you understand about the problem or recommendation visually / graphically
• Give and crystal clear analysis.
Some typical case problems are:
1. Market share
2. Diminishing profit margins
3. High profits
4. Low capacity issues
5. Customer Turnover
6. Increase competition
7. New Product / Service Introduction
8. Geographical expansion
9. Investment Decision
10. Investment into another firm
11. Merger and acquisition
Can you create your own consulting framework?
Let’s suppose there is an XYZ company. The company is dealing in the wholesale market.
Problem areas of the company are –
Location
Location plays a vital role in customer reach to your business place location of the company is compromising like not in the market (off-site) that’s why the shop is out of reach of the customer. It is believed location must be between the point of demand and supplier. Access to the customer is the primary concern of the shop.
Low profits margins
As the company is already looking for a new customer there are few available customers, so undoubtedly the company has a deal with a small profit margin to retain them. In wholesale, you are already dealing in a low-profit margin. In this situation, the business is only in serving mode.
Low customer potential
• The most common problem faced by the company is low customer equity.
• Similar products/substitutes are available.
• As the company is dealing in wholesale markets, most of the shops are selling the same type of product, which means a substitute of the product is available.
Low production
Another major issue of the company is low production. There is a small no supplier, so you have to manage among their suppliers to streamline your production.
Referrals
Liu, K., Sun, L., Jambari, D., Michell, V., & Chong, S. (2011, June). A design of a business-technology alignment consulting framework. In the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (pp. 422-435). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Kubr, M. (Ed.). (2002). Management consulting: A guide to the profession. International Labour Organization.
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