Teamwork in consulting

1. Because working alone is boring and much less fun than working in a team
2. Typically there's it's too much work to do for a single person
3. The type of work requires multiple different skill sets 
4. As a means of quality control
5. So junior team members can get coaching from senior team members
6. .... I'm sure there are many more

Hi there,

Interesting question that no-one seems to ask!

1. Fundamentally, the assignments/tasks at hand generally can't be done by one person. These are massive/broad/vague topics that move entire Fortune 500 companies - hard to put that on just one person!
2. Time is critical on most of these projects. When picking between 1 person for 4 months or 4 people for 1 month to figure out how to respond to xx existential threat to the company, which would you pick as a CEO? :P
3. Work done by teams is generally better. Humans are social creatures. We need to discuss, ideate, review, etc. Eveyrone brings something different to the table. At the end of the day, something done by multiple people will be better than someone done by one (assuming all are high calibre and the end product needs brainpower).

Great question!

Because

• There's a lot of work and one person alone usually cannot do it
• At a minimum, you need a person who does the grunt work (excel and ppt) and one (or a share of time of one) that is more senior and experienced and can project credibility and charisma in front of the senior leaders of the customer and at the same time manage the junior resource (and this guy would be too expensive to do the grunt work himself)

The smallest team I've seen in an MBB team is one business analyst + 30% of the time of a project leader / EM.

In the professional services industry (and many others), no job is really solo, if you think of it. You may be an individual contributor but will need to indirectly manage others to get the job done. 

Depending on the type (length, scope, complexity etc) of project sold, consulting teams can be as small as 1 full-time person + 1 part-time person to 40-50 (or bigger) person pyramid teams. 

Hi, usually the project should be delivered in 1-4 months and it is too big for 1 single person. However, there are some engagements with only one associate

Best,
Antonello

Hello!

Usually, in a nutshell, because there are multiple workstreams in an engagement and you need to share among people. If not, it would take forever. 

Hope it helps!

Cheers, 

Clara