Hi there,

Great questions!

First, let me just clarify that, like anywhere, the "we have it all" statements should always be taken with a grain of salt. Remember, as a consultant at MBB you are doing a lot of work. Noone is there to hold your hand in slide creation, analysis, etc. 

1. These are not only specific to MBB. MBB tends to spend more money and have more availability of these services, but the others do have support functions (to varying degrees)

2. Cosultants 100% have to build the slides. Don't forget, this is 90% of your job! However, there are a few services that you can leverage to 1) Perform rote tasks on a deck (i.e. align everything, change x across the deck, etc) 2) Beautify a slide/deck (requires approval and takes planning/time) and 3) Create slides from your drawings (used for select slides only).

At the end of the day, you build 90% of the deck yourself. You have to know how to powerpoint...

3) They can technically leverage the support like all other resources. However, in a sense, they are the support! Entry-level consultants are expected to do a lot of that slide creation grunt work. The better you are at it, the easier your life is!

Hey there,

1. There is quite a bit of difference in the level and depth of support functions. McKinsey is known to have invested the most into everything that makes the daily life of a consultant a bit easier. For instance, they have a global helpdesk (GHD) and the unofficial rule is that you should call them whenever you struggle more than 5 minutes with an approach to something (tech problem, Excel analysis, etc.). This expands to other fields as well (e.g., turnaround time for a new laptop in less than a day if something breaks to a random client location, new phone sent across the globe because mine was stolen on the street while being on vacation, etc.).

2. Everything from slide creation (based on your draft), slide beautification, simple analysis to more complex statistical and analytical models, industry research, etc.

3. Fully and it is highly encouraged to use them right from the start since it will make your life significantly easier.

Cheers,

Florian

(edited)

Mosy big Consulting companies have invested and setup a support function to assist with research, creating slides, glossy papers etc. Effectiveness of this support varies widely really and in my personl experience I was underwhelmed. As Consultants you must lead on creating your deliverables (ppt, excel or whatever else) and ensure quality. To effectively use the support teams you must brief them really well and provide them investment cover to charge their time. So, using them is a quetion of the task at hand, priority and other factors as you can imagine. It can be done but varies from project to project. Junior consultants certainly will have limited access to them.

All firms have support to some extend. The difference are the services offered. MBB have the highest revenue per consultant/year, so they can afford to have more extensive teams than other firms. Support copvers everything from research, slide work, graphics design, analytics, workshop development, survey design, etc. and yes, also junior team members have access. Though you might test with your superiors as these services generate costs that have to be charged to a cost center.