How much research work does a consultant do?

Question

I understand that some MBB firms have a specific research/expertise/domain knowledge department and consultants reach out to them for info. So how much research work do consultants do? Is it right to say that consultants focus on structuring the issue, speaking with client's staff, seeking research from the in-house research/expertise/domain team and then analysing all the info?

Answer 1

Hi there,

The short answer that that the consultants do a lot of research, they just do different research. Think about it as a delineation/segmentation of roles across the type of research.

When you think about it, speaking to domain experts is research - a consultant can't become an expert in a few weeks/months so they need to pull knowledge from the expert, client, internet, etc. For time-intensive research, or institution-based research, they can reach out to company experts to get the data/info. But, of course, the consultants need to know what to ask for, how to ask for it, and then what to do with it.

Make sense?

Answer 2

Hi,

This is an interesting question - and really depends on a couple of dynamics:

Scope of research
- Sometimes more mundane/repetitive research can be outsourced either to the research team, or to temporary research assistants
- However other types of more complex research is best done by the consultant themselves
Case budget
- Sometimes you don't have budget to incur additional resources to help with research
Time
- Sometimes the time it takes to get external or outsourced help to do the research is longer than the time you can afford - in this case you would end up doing the research yourself

Hope this helps to clarify!

Answer 3

Analysist spend a lot of their time researching. It can be conduting primary research (interviews), finding experts, preparing surveys, analyzing surveys, interviewing clients' staff, googling news, analyzing industry reports (provided by the research team), analyzing competitors investor presentations, …

Of course, if you look at this, it is actually research + analysis.

Then they also work on communication (slides) and on quantitative analysis (e.g. based on data provided by the client).

Regarding “structuring the issue” this is mostly manager type of work (but experienced analytists and senior consultants do this as well, for their own workstreams)