Internal consulting

Hello, I'm Dr. William Trotter. And I'd like to share my thoughts on the emerging role of internal consulting as a key capability for both private and public sector organizations to maximize their value. I'd also like to talk a little bit in this session about the attractiveness of internal consulting as a career path. My observations are based on my personal experience and focus in this area over the last twenty-plus years. Including leading an internal consulting practice at a major international company, providing consulting services as an external consultant to these groups, and being involved in a global network of internal consulting groups, and finally recently publishing a book on the subject.

Let me start by talking about what internal consulting is. It's a very broad area. It really involves employees providing client support services within the enterprise, in a variety of functions. They can either be in a formally designated internal consulting group, or a variety of support or shared service functions. And you can see from the list it just pretty much spans the whole support functions in a company, including project management where the need is for better implementation and change management techniques. And quality management becoming more of a business partner type of role, and that's true for all of these, kind of the transition from sort of a strictly providing certain services in terms of their functional area, to really being more of a business partner type relationship. So you can see it as you look at the list it just spans a lot of areas. Human resources, obviously there, you've gotten a whole question of working with clients around their human capital planning. Information technology really again, this whole business partnering role. So you can see it really spans many areas of the company and many methodology areas too, including the whole process improvement area, the whole planning area, and training development change management. So again, it's a vast area that is really just beginning to be professionalized if you will in terms of methodologies and sharing the best practices and this type of thing.