Impact of Consultancy Skills | Professional Communication and Consultancy Skills Assignment

This is a consultancy report sample, written for a professional communication and consultancy skills module. The client is AMD Consultancy Group, a fictional UK consulting firm invented for the brief, and its initials are not a reference to any real company. Every figure attached to it, and to the three competitors, was constructed for the assignment and is internally consistent so that the arithmetic can be checked. The report works through a service review, a competitor analysis, a SWOT analysis, two costed recommendations with an action plan and key success indicators, and a first-person reflection built on Kolb's learning cycle.

If you have a brief like this one, our essay writing help covers consultancy reports and reflective writing, and more samples sit in education and study guides. For the reflective half, read the reflection paper example; for a comparable people-management case study, read the HRM assignment example.

Executive Summary of the Consultancy Report

AMD Consultancy Group is a London-based consulting firm founded in 2019, with 134 staff and fee income of £15.1m in its most recent financial year. It is profitable, at an operating margin of 12.6 per cent, but two operating numbers explain why growth has stalled: consultant utilisation is 68 per cent and client retention is 71 per cent. The firm wins work and then loses too much of the capacity it has paid for.

This report evaluates the firm through a service review, a competitor analysis against three rivals and a SWOT, and makes two recommendations: raise utilisation to 74 per cent by fixing how work is scheduled and scoped, and lift retention to 80 per cent by changing how engagements are closed and followed up. On the figures set out below, the first is worth about £1.33m in additional fee income a year at the current day rate. Three key success indicators are proposed so that both can be judged on evidence at six and twelve months.

What Are Consultancy Skills and Professional Skills?

Consultancy skills are the skills a consultant applies to a client's business: observation, structured problem solving, and decision making under incomplete information. Professional skills are the behaviours that decide whether the work lands, among them writing, listening and managing expectations. This report treats the second group as a condition of the first, not as a softer companion to it.

Introduction

The aim of this report is to analyse the consultancy and professional skills that a consulting firm depends on, and to apply them to a client. The research literature supports the emphasis on the second group. Studying seven projects inside an international technical consulting firm, Nikolova, Reihlen and Schlapfner (2009) identify three practices that characterise client work: shaping impressions, problem solving, and negotiating expectations. Only one of the three is analysis. Alvesson and colleagues (2009) add a complication that matters for any student report: the client is rarely one person. A recommendation accepted by an operations director and resisted by the finance function has not been accepted.

Lycko and Galanakis (2021) set out what a student consultancy project is expected to produce, and the learning outcome they describe is the ability to convert an analysis into something the client can act on. That is the standard this report is written against.

Background

AMD Consultancy Group was founded in 2019 and works across the United Kingdom from one London office. It sells three service lines: operations improvement, data and reporting, and change management. Its position in the market is mid-sized. The Management Consultancies Association puts the UK consulting industry at around £20.4bn, so the firm holds a fraction of one per cent of it, which sets the realistic ambition for this report at improving the economics of the work it already wins rather than at taking market share.

The figures below are the ones this report works from, and the rest of the analysis has to reconcile with them.

Table 1: the client's operating figures, constructed for this assignment

The fee income reconciles with the capacity figures: 96 consultants, at 220 available days each and 68 per cent utilisation, produce 14,360 billable days, which at £1,050 a day gives £15.1m. Stating the arithmetic this way matters, because it turns the firm's problem into a number that a recommendation can move.

How Do You Evaluate a Consultancy Firm's Current Situation?

This report evaluates the client in four steps. A service review sets out what the firm sells and how clients rate it. A competitor analysis compares it with three rival firms on size, positioning and price. A SWOT analysis separates internal from external factors, with a figure in each quadrant. A findings section then ties both analyses back to the two numbers that have to change.

Service Review

The three service lines are unequal, and the imbalance is the first finding. Operations improvement produces £8.4m of the fee income, data and reporting £4.6m, and change management £2.1m. Change management is also the line with the lowest utilisation at 61 per cent, because its projects arrive irregularly and its consultants cannot easily be moved onto the other two.

AMD Consultancy Group fee income by service line, financial year 2025

Chart data

Item	Value (m GBP)
Operations improvement	8.4 m GBP
Data and reporting	4.6 m GBP
Change management	2.1 m GBP

Client feedback is collected at the end of each engagement and scored out of ten. The average is 7.8 across all three lines, with operations improvement at 8.3 and change management at 6.9. The written comments behind the lower score repeat two complaints: the scope moved during the engagement, and the final report arrived without a plan for who would carry the recommendations after the consultants left. Both are professional-skills problems rather than analytical ones, which is consistent with what the literature on client interaction predicts.

The firm does no structured follow-up after an engagement closes. There is no review at 90 days and no named owner of the relationship once the invoice is paid, which is the most plausible explanation for retention of 71 per cent alongside a satisfaction score of 7.8. Clients are not dissatisfied; they are simply not contacted again.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis exists to show where a firm can and cannot compete. Porter's (1979) framing is the one used here: the question is not who the rivals are but which forces set the margin in this market, and in consulting the two that bind are the bargaining power of large clients and the low cost of entry for a small specialist. The three competitors below were constructed for this assignment to represent the three positions AMD actually competes against.

Table 2: competitor comparison, figures constructed for this assignment

Three conclusions follow. AMD cannot win against Brackenhill on scale, and bidding against it on large programmes wastes proposal time. Northgate is the direct comparison, and the gap is not in the work but in the operating discipline: eight percentage points of utilisation and thirteen of retention. Lyth shows that a narrower reputation can command a higher rate than a broader one, which is an argument against AMD's habit of describing itself as able to help with anything.

The competitive threat that matters most is therefore not the largest firm. It is the similarly sized firm that runs the same business better, because it can underbid AMD at the same quality and still earn more per consultant.

SWOT Analysis of the Consultancy

SWOT is used here with a figure in every cell. Hill and Westbrook (1997) examined SWOT use in practice and found that it usually produced long, unweighted lists that were never used in the strategy that followed, which is the failure mode to avoid. Each entry below is either a number from Table 1 and Table 2 or a statement the report later acts on.

Table 3: SWOT analysis of AMD Consultancy Group

Strengths

The firm's strength is the quality of the work in its largest service line. An 8.3 satisfaction score in a line producing £8.4m of fee income means the delivery capability is not the problem, and retention of 71 per cent has been achieved with no account management at all, which suggests the base is better than the process that supports it.

Weaknesses

Both weaknesses are internal and measurable. Utilisation of 68 per cent means the firm pays for roughly 6,700 consultant days a year that it does not bill, and the change management line is the largest single contributor. The absence of relationship ownership after close is the second, and it explains the third of clients who do not return.

Opportunities

The utilisation gap is the opportunity because it needs no new clients. Moving from 68 to 74 per cent produces 1,267 additional billable days from the same 96 consultants, which at £1,050 a day is £1.33m of fee income with no increase in headcount. Repositioning data and reporting as a named specialism is the second, and the third is the 90-day review, which costs a consultant a day per client.

Threats

The real threat is Northgate Advisory rather than Brackenhill Partners. A competitor of the same size with better utilisation can quote a lower price at the same margin, which turns AMD's operating weakness into a pricing disadvantage in every competitive bid.

Findings and Analysis

The service review and the competitor analysis converge on the same two numbers. Utilisation of 68 per cent and retention of 71 per cent explain both the margin gap against the closest competitor and the amount of effort the firm has to spend winning work it has already won once.

AMD Consultancy Group against its closest competitor, Northgate Advisory

Point of comparison	AMD	Northgate
Staff	AMD 134	Northgate 120
Average day rate	AMD £1,050	Northgate £1,100
Utilisation	AMD 68 per cent	Northgate 76 per cent
Client retention	AMD 71 per cent	Northgate 84 per cent

The causes are not analytical capability. Client comments name scope movement and the absence of a handover plan, and both are failures of expectation management, which is one of the three practices Nikolova and colleagues (2009) identify in successful client work. The finding for the recommendations section is therefore that the firm should invest in how engagements are scoped, scheduled and closed rather than in the technical content of the work, because the technical content already scores 8.3 where it is strongest.

One limit on this analysis should be stated. Retention of 71 per cent is measured across all clients, and a single large client leaving would move it several points, so the figure should be read alongside the concentration of fee income before any target is set on it.

What Recommendations Should a Consultancy Report Give a Client?

This report makes two recommendations, each with a written justification, a number and a date. The first is to raise consultant utilisation from 68 to 74 per cent by changing how work is scoped and scheduled, worth about £1.33m in fee income a year. The second is to raise client retention from 71 to 80 per cent through named relationship ownership and a 90-day review.

The Two Recommendations

Recommendation 1: raise utilisation from 68 per cent to 74 per cent within twelve months

Justification: at 96 consultants and 220 available days each, six percentage points of utilisation is 1,267 billable days, or about £1.33m at the current average day rate of £1,050. No new clients are required, and the cost is a scheduling function rather than headcount. The measure has to be paired with the satisfaction score, because utilisation can be raised in the short term by overloading consultants, which would show up in the 7.8 average within two quarters. The change management line is the first place to act, at 61 per cent, and the practical change there is to train its consultants to work on data and reporting engagements between programmes so that capacity is transferable.

Recommendation 2: raise client retention from 71 per cent to 80 per cent within twelve months

Justification: a third of clients currently do not return, so the firm runs a business-development effort to replace revenue it already earned once. Two changes address the causes named in client feedback. Each engagement gets a written scope with a change-control step, so that scope movement becomes a documented decision rather than a source of resentment, and each closes with a handover plan naming who in the client organisation owns each recommendation. A named account owner then runs a review at 90 days. Recognising that the client is several people rather than one, as Alvesson and colleagues (2009) argue, the handover should be agreed with the function that has to fund the change as well as with the sponsor.

Action Plan for the Client

Table 4: action plan

Key Success Indicators

Three indicators are proposed, each with a baseline, a target and a date. Kaplan and Norton's (1992) argument for a small balanced set applies here: a firm that measures only utilisation will raise it at the cost of the work, so a quality measure and a growth measure sit alongside it.

Client satisfaction

Baseline 7.8 out of ten across all lines, with change management at 6.9. Target 8.3 overall at twelve months, with no line below 7.5. This indicator exists to catch the failure mode of Recommendation 1, and it should be reported in the same paper as utilisation so that the two are read together.

New clients won and clients retained

Baseline 71 per cent retention and, on the current pattern, a business-development effort that replaces the lost third. Target 80 per cent retention at twelve months. The growth measure is then meaningful for the first time, because new clients add to the base instead of refilling it.

Utilisation and recruitment

Baseline 68 per cent utilisation with 96 fee-earning consultants. Target 74 per cent at twelve months, which is 15,628 billable days and about £16.4m of fee income at the current rate. Recruitment should not begin until utilisation passes 74 per cent, because hiring into spare capacity would make the ratio worse, and that sequencing is the point of pairing the two in one indicator.

How Do You Reflect on a Consultancy Project Using Kolb's Cycle?

By working through the four stages in order. Concrete experience records what the consultant saw at the client. Reflective observation analyses the critical issues behind it. Abstract conceptualisation turns that into a general lesson. Active experimentation sets out what to try next. The reflection below is written in the first person, stage by stage.

The cycle is Kolb's, and the version used here is the account given by Kolb and Kolb (2009), in which learning is the process of making meaning from direct experience rather than a single event of insight. A reflection that stops after the first two stages describes an experience; the marks are in the third and fourth. Our personality assessment assignment sample makes the same move from a personality report rather than a project, and ends with goals that carry dates and measures.

Kolb's Learning Cycle, Stage by Stage

Concrete experience

I spent the first week of the engagement collecting the operating figures in Table 1 and reading two years of end-of-engagement feedback. I had expected to find a capability problem, because the firm's growth had stalled. What I found was an 8.3 satisfaction score in the largest service line and 6,700 unbilled consultant days a year. I also noticed that the finance lead and the operations director gave different accounts of why utilisation was low, and that neither had seen the other's figures.

Reflective observation

Looking back, my first hypothesis was wrong for a reason worth recording: I had taken the symptom the client presented, stalled growth, as a statement of the problem. The evidence pointed instead at scheduling and at the way engagements ended. I also underweighted the disagreement between the two managers at the time, and only later saw that it was the finding rather than background noise, because a firm in which two functions hold different versions of the same number cannot act on either.

Abstract conceptualisation

The general lesson is that a client's stated problem is a claim to be tested, not a brief to be delivered. This is what the literature on client interaction describes as negotiating expectations, and it has to happen at the start rather than at the end. The second lesson is that the client is plural. A recommendation has to be acceptable to the function that pays for it as well as to the sponsor who commissioned it, which changed how I wrote the second recommendation above.

Active experimentation

On the next engagement I will do three things differently. I will ask for the operating figures before agreeing the scope, so that the problem statement is built on data rather than on the presenting complaint. I will interview the finance function separately in the first week. And I will write the handover plan in the first fortnight rather than the last, so that the question of who owns each recommendation is settled while there is still time to change it.

Key Lessons from the Project

Quantify before recommending

The recommendation that carried weight with this client was the one attached to £1.33m, and the arithmetic behind it was simple. Before this project I would have written that utilisation should improve. The lesson is that a number the client can check is more persuasive than an argument they have to accept, and that the work of producing it is usually an afternoon.

Communication is part of the deliverable

The lowest-scoring service line was not the least competent one; it was the one that managed expectations worst. That maps directly onto the practices Nikolova and colleagues (2009) identify, and it changed how I think about the professional skills side of this module. Writing, scoping and closing are not the presentation layer on top of the analysis. They decide whether the analysis has any effect.

What Did the Consultancy Report Conclude?

That the firm's problem is operating discipline rather than capability. Competitor analysis and SWOT together point at two numbers, utilisation of 68 per cent and retention of 71 per cent, and both can be moved without new clients or new services. The recommendations are costed and dated so the client can judge them at twelve months.

The comparison with Northgate Advisory is the finding that should change the client's behaviour, because it shows a firm of the same size earning more from the same kind of work. The route to closing that gap runs through scheduling, scoping and the way engagements end, not through the technical content of the reports, which already scores 8.3 in the largest line.

Two limitations belong in the conclusion. The figures are constructed for this assignment, so the method rather than the numbers is what transfers to a real client. And the retention target assumes the current client base is not concentrated in a few large accounts; if it is, the first action should be to measure that concentration before setting any target at all.

Related samples and pages:

• Reflection paper example, the fuller guide to writing the reflective half of a report like this.
• HRM assignment example, a case study on staff performance and retention.
• Cultural differences in business, for consultancy briefs that cross borders.
• Communication in healthcare, a pre-nursing assignment that argues, as this report does, that communication is part of the work rather than a soft skill.
• Financial analysis sample, if your client report needs ratios and statements.
• Report writing help, for the report structures and referencing styles we cover.
• All education and study-guide samples.

Need a consultancy or reflective report on your own client brief? Message us on WhatsApp with the brief and your deadline.

Sources

• Alvesson, M., Kärreman, D., Sturdy, A. and Handley, K. (2009) 'Unpacking the client(s): constructions, positions and client-consultant dynamics', Scandinavian Journal of Management, 25(3), pp. 253-263. doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2009.05.001
• Hill, T. and Westbrook, R. (1997) 'SWOT analysis: it's time for a product recall', Long Range Planning, 30(1), pp. 46-52. doi:10.1016/S0024-6301(96)00095-7
• Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1992) 'The balanced scorecard: measures that drive performance', Harvard Business Review, January-February. Available at: hbr.org
• Kolb, A.Y. and Kolb, D.A. (2009) 'The learning way: meta-cognitive aspects of experiential learning', Simulation & Gaming, 40(3), pp. 297-327. doi:10.1177/1046878108325713
• Lycko, M. and Galanakis, K. (2021) 'Student consultancy projects playbook: learning outcomes and a framework for teaching practice in an international entrepreneurial context', The International Journal of Management Education, 19(1), 100285. doi:10.1016/j.ijme.2019.02.005
• Management Consultancies Association (n.d.) The consulting industry. Available at: mca.org.uk
• Nikolova, N., Reihlen, M. and Schlapfner, J.-F. (2009) 'Client-consultant interaction: capturing social practices of professional service production', Scandinavian Journal of Management, 25(3), pp. 289-298. doi:10.1016/j.scaman.2009.05.004
• Porter, M.E. (1979) 'How competitive forces shape strategy', Harvard Business Review, March. Available at: hbr.org