Glossary of Management Consulting Terms

Documentation – Writing about the job, instead of doing it. Employees should spend one hour working and four hours documenting it.

Process – The practice of focusing on how something gets done, at the expense of actually getting it done. Ideally, results are ignored, and process becomes an end in itself. All processes should be documented.

Procedures – A set of related processes arranged in the most inefficient and confusing manner possible.

Process re-engineering – You take a process that has worked for years – if not decades – and change it until it doesn’t anymore. The job no longer gets done, but you utilise new and innovative methods of not doing it. Process re-engineering is normally directed towards meeting one or more measurable objectives.

Measurable objectives – justifications for costly process re-engineering efforts. For obvious reasons, these must be neither measurable nor objective. Ideally, measurable objectives should be rolled up into a mission statement. Often, the illusion of progress toward meeting these objectives will be created through the use of performance metrics.

Mission statement - A vague, generic, feel-good slogan that gets framed and hung on the wall, after which nobody but its author ever pays attention to it again. While often disparaged by those who don't know any better, mission statements are nonetheless vital to maintaining the management consultant's fragile ego. When asked what he/she has accomplished, one can always point to the mission statement.

Performance metrics – The method by which ill-defined and poorly understood measureable objectives are quantified, thus lending them an appearance of legitimacy that they simply do not possess. Performance metrics are a favourite tool of management accountants.

Management accountant – No one trusts you with the financials, so you became a management accountant. You document processes, create performance metrics, oversee re-engineering projects, develop costing methods, and engage in any other parasitic activity that doesn’t involve making a legitimate contribution to society. If you excel at this, you may become a management consultant.

Management consultant – a parasitic free-lancer who leverages his ability to leach valuable economic resources by spreading his efforts across multiple firms.

Costing methods – The art of pretending to know with great precision exactly how much each task or process within an organization costs. In reality, you haven’t got a clue.

Lessons learned document – A central repository where employees are encouraged to document their mistakes so that they are not repeated. Over time, it is hoped that the lessons learned document will become a valuable source of institutional knowledge. In reality, the employee who willingly documents his mistakes for others to read is probably the last person from whom you should be learning.

Institutional knowledge – the knowledge that senior employees have acquired through years of experience, and refuse to share with others. When they retire, it is lost forever. Don’t even try to capture it. That’s just the way it is.

Working group – An informal group of three or more individuals who gather to discuss the merits of forming a committee.

Committee – a working group that can no longer can be described as “working” with a straight face. The subject of discussion of the original working group has now become a project. Though output can vary greatly, a committee will usually produce a weighty tome known as a report.

Project – an excuse to form a committee. If the project gains enough of a profile within the organization, it can be upgraded to a special project.

Special project – There is much disagreement over what differentiates a special project from a regular one. This grey area works to your advantage, as any project can be deemed special, provided it is supported by the appropriate documentation.

Deadline – the date by which you must announce your first deadline extension.

Deadline extension – A block of time following the original deadline, during which work on the project finally starts. A project or report completed without at least one deadline extension is highly suspect. Deadline extensions are often used to spread a project across more than one fiscal year, making cost overruns seem less onerous. Special projects have unique budgetary considerations, and may need multiple deadline extensions spanning several years.

Report – Created by a committee in an attempt to justify its existence, a report unfailingly achieves the opposite. It contains numerous run-on sentences, meaningless acronyms, obscure jargon, ambiguous wording, and bad grammar. If not, you will be asked to rewrite it. Unusable and unreadable, a report is designed for maximum bulk. This way it serves as documentation to justify large blocks of otherwise unproductive time.^* Ultimately, several copies of a report must be printed and bound. Care must be taken to store these copies in a location where no one can find them. All completed reports must be forwarded for approval.

* For example, if your manager expresses dismay over the fact that you haven’t been at your desk for six months, you can defend yourself by saying, “I’ve been working my butt off on the IT Infrastructure Modernization Report!” Obviously, this is far more convincing if you can point to a hefty stack of papers. More convincing still if you can cite several missed deadlines. (See deadline extension above.) Best of all is a report so thick that your supervisor won’t ever try to read it.

Forwarding for approval – You send completed work to your supervisor to be rubber-stamped. The supervisor then “approves” the work before forwarding it to his boss, and taking credit for it. On up the ladder it goes. This process is repeated once for each layer of management in the organization (i.e., a dozen or more times). In all probability, the item will languish in someone’s inbox until it is no longer relevant, before finally reaching the intended recipient. Occasionally, the intended recipient will die waiting for it. You must take care when forwarding for approval that you always direct the item through appropriate channels.

Intended recipient – The individual who most urgently needed your message – and didn’t get it. Quite possibly, the intended recipient will be the only person in the entire organization who did not have it copied to her several times.

Appropriate channel – the process whereby important communications are sent via the longest, most convoluted and inefficient route possible. Ideally, this is done through email, which can later be printed for documentation. The message is slightly reworded, or “clarified”, at each stop along the way. Ultimately, the text becomes so mangled that it retains none of its original meaning. As the original author, you then acquire a completely undeserved reputation for sending incoherent and misleading emails. This reputation is career-limiting. You have no control over this, so don’t worry about it.

Copy (aka “cc”) – similar to forwarding for approval, only more spontaneous, and more horizontal in its distribution. The concept is simple enough. Would you rather show one person how busy you are? Or ten people? I thought so.

Synergy – That rare occasion when the two or more parts of the organization are not working at cross-purposes. Rare enough to need its own word. Synergy.

Value-added – the common practice of adding completely unnecessary steps to an already absurdly inefficient process, and pretending the result is better. Whoever invented this term had one hell of a sense of humour.

Product quality initiative – A highly specialized re-engineering project designed to increase value-added.

Minimum service standard – The bare minimum we can get away with. If we could do less for you, we would.

Irony – words or phrases that appear to mean one thing, but imply the exact opposite. Examples of irony include ‘value-added’, ‘intended recipient’, and ‘product quality initiative’. At one time, etymologists believed that ‘minimum service standard’ also conveyed irony. However, more recent developments seem to indicate that it means exactly what it says.