Turning analysis into an answer is an active step, you can drive.
Here is the test I applied to every piece of work that crossed my desk. Can somebody look at the output of your analysis for ten seconds and understand the insight? If not, the analysis is not done
How to turn a hypothesis into execution, what to do when you have no data, and how to pivot when the hypothesis breaks.
A good workplan keeps you aligned and focused. A bad one creates rework and confusion.
Start from evidence, not intuition
Build an issue tree for each part
MECE, answer-first thinking, and the habits that make a first hypothesis useful.
Once you understand the problem, break the question into its major components. The goal is a structure that is MECE: mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. Clean, non-overlapping buckets that together cover everything that matters.
This structure
You can only deliver a good result when you understand the Problem. During the interview, you have been trained to do that. Apply this knowledge now.
Before you open Excel or start building slides, build a working model of the company you are working for. What exactly is the product
The Case is the basic unit of consulting work. A Consulting team is tasked with cracking the case.
Consulting is a service business. A client faces a tough problem and lacks the internal resources to solve it, so they buy external, specialised help. You are always a service provider to
The project is your entire focus. For the person across the table it is a line item on a list they did not write. Most things about good client work follows from that one asymmetry.
You work for the client and the client pays the bill. But very few clients
One of the most underrated skills in consulting Five minutes of estimation tells you whether four hours of modelling is worth it.
Can you quickly say whether something is worth millions or tens of millions? Whether an opportunity is worth pursuing or clearly too small to bother with?
That is
Email is your central communicatrion medium. If you nail them you increase your efficiency significantly. And, never write anything in an email that you would not want everybody to read
The goal: make the message as readable and as fast to act on as possible. The recipient should understand what
Slides in consulting are for reading, not presenting.
The client will read your deck, forward it internally, and pull it up again nine months later. Nobody will be in the room to explain it. Every page has to stand on its own. Which puts an enormous amount of weight on
Under-communicating is the number one mistake new hires make. Here is what your silence looks like from the other side of the table, and the system that fixes it.
New hires assume the supervisor sees everything. They do not. Your supervisor has their own workload, their own manager to