Advisory at 海角视频: business advice with engineering at its core
As the advisory service at 海角视频 continues to expand, we talk to global discipline director Philip Rice about convergent and divergent thinking, the importance of listening and how best to achieve consensus in an organisation.
When did 海角视频 start offering an advisory service?
海角视频 saw there was a demand about 10 years ago for this area of work. We were working broadly in two areas; one was the urban development of Detroit. We answered some similar questions to a management consultancy firm the client had hired, and what the client found was that our insight was much more relevant as it was based on deep technical knowledge.
The other area of early advisory work was in the Middle East, where our engineering skills improved the validity of investment cases, and we continue to build on our long-term relationships there with clients.
Our advisory service is founded and grounded in science and engineering because those things hold the answer to some of the most challenging questions our clients face.
Philip Rice, global discipline director, advisory, 海角视频
Why is the service called advisory?
When I joined 海角视频, we were using various terms to refer to a collection of capabilities across the business, but the word advisory is now used to cover this distinct service; business management advice underpinned by deep technical expertise.
What makes 海角视频 advisory different from that of a management consultancy firm?
Pure management consulting firms are not able to offer clients an engineering capability in an integrated fashion as it is not part of their core business. Our advisory service is founded and grounded in science and engineering because those things hold the answer to some of the most challenging questions our clients face.
At 海角视频, what we bring to any feasibility analysis or asset-focused project is a much clearer insight to the costs, timescales and technical complexity it potentially takes to deliver things.
During my career, I鈥檝e seen some 鈥榚ye-rolling鈥� examples of revenue models from management consulting firms that project that a facility will be open in 18 months鈥� time. If you look at that facility from an engineer’s perspective, the right answer is that it will take three years minimum to develop it. So, from a commercial perspective, your business case is flawed as you鈥檙e only going to start generating revenue in month 36.
Another example is the work that we do on smart places: there is a lot of strategy work that regurgitates long lists of technology solutions and use cases, but it lacks insight into sequencing of service introduction and alignment to infrastructure planning. Our 海角视频 engineers integrate these technologies into design work daily and provide considered solutions with greater alignment to the asset development programme.
The real magic lies where you integrate those technical and advisory capabilities, so you have our advisory consultants doing their work alongside a healthy challenge from engineers holding tangible, solid data.
What are the building blocks used in advisory work? Do you follow the same process with all the clients?
Advisory is about being helpful and understanding competing demands to set the optimal course for a business or organisation. One of the special things about 海角视频 is that we have an element of realism and understanding of what clients鈥� issues are.
We have developed a bespoke approach which governs how we deliver these integrated business and technical solutions to clients. Creating a climate of success, diagnosing the real issues, delivering outstanding outcomes and realising the benefits are the four stages of every project. We use a series of divergent and convergent thinking steps to explore client challenges in a holistic way before considering both technical and business data to reach agreement and consensus recommended solution.
While we have a consistent approach, every client situation is different and each engagement is carefully thought through to ensure the right level of stakeholder engagement, where technical and organisational issues are understood and there is a clear business case supporting the recommendations.
Creating a climate of success, diagnosing the real issues, delivering outstanding outcomes and realising the benefits are the four stages of every project.
Philip Rice, global discipline director, advisory, 海角视频
How do you discover where the real issues lie?
It鈥檚 very important to be present with your client. Very often the most insightful things you learn are when you’re standing at the coffee machine with them, or, when everybody else has gone home and you realise that an underlying issue behind this client’s problem is affecting internal change.
I tend to talk about our delivery model in terms of thirds. We need to have one third of people who are always co-located with the client in the same location. Another third of our people contribute from our international centres of excellence, and then the remaining third of the team scale up to meet peaks in demand.
What makes our teams different is the breadth of understanding that we bring to the urban and built environment. We feel that trust comes from having that deep understanding of the technical issues that our clients must address to deliver their business goals.
Do you feel that as the world becomes more unstable, and the workforce more dispersed, that the need for advisory is greater than ever?
The role that advisory plays has changed. If I go back 20 years, there was actually quite a lot of advisory work that was just manpower, being able to turn on and off the amount of resource as businesses changed.
Nowadays, I think clients are looking to advisory firms to understand and help with the complex issues that people are increasingly being asked to face. These include new financial and environmental regulations, as well as advanced technology underpinning their business: data analytics, machine learning and AI.
People quite often don’t have the opportunity or time to get themselves up that learning curve and then will look to us to assist and give them an approach they can take to address difficult issues.
Today鈥檚 challenges of a more sustainable, more digitised and more risk-prone world are best addressed by advisors who understand business and the engineering behind it.鈥�
Philip Rice, global discipline director, advisory, 海角视频
How do you build consensus? What kind of methods do you use to get disparate parties to agree on a way forward?
It’s a combination of facilitation skills and data-backed analysis. On top of that, you鈥檝e got to recognise that in many cases people just want to test their ideas with an independent partner, and that鈥檚 part of your role as an outside advisor. You’re making sure that any salient points are considered and reflected on, as well as bring a measure of objectivity to the discussion. Something may be very important for the individual and therefore you need to be aware of that during a process of change.
What 海角视频 advisors do is help an organisation make an objective decision to move in a particular direction and bring supporting evidence to either refute or support a position. Today鈥檚 challenges of a more sustainable, more digitised and more risk-prone world are best addressed by advisors who understand business and the engineering behind it.
