Business Consulting Practice and Diagnostic Methods
What this domain tests
This domain tests method: how to scope an engagement, structure an ambiguous problem, gather and test evidence, find root causes rather than symptoms, prioritise, and hand over something the client can sustain.
Core rules
- Scoping. Agree the question, the decision it feeds, the deliverable, the data access and the boundaries before analysis. An unstated scope guarantee is a delivery risk.
- Issue trees. Decompose MECE - mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive - then prune with hypotheses so data collection is targeted.
- Diagnostic tools. 3C and value chain for position, five forces for industry attractiveness, BSC and KPI trees for performance, and financial ratios for symptoms. SWOT describes; it does not prioritise.
- Root cause. Pareto isolates the vital few, 5 Whys and fishbone (man, machine, material, method, measurement, environment) explain why. Fixing a symptom moves the problem.
- Prioritisation. Score on impact × feasibility and sequence by dependency, not by ease alone.
- Implementation. Name an owner, a milestone and a metric for each recommendation; use a change model such as ADKAR to test readiness.
- Ethics. Confidentiality, conflict-of-interest disclosure, and independence of the recommendation from the fee structure.
Worked example
A client logs 500 complaints a month. Pareto shows three causes at 210, 120 and 60 - 390, or 78% of the total. A 5 Whys review of the largest cause traces it to a locating-fixture error. Correcting it removes 60% of those 210 complaints, i.e. 126 a month. At KRW 40,000 handling cost each, the saving is KRW 5.04m a month; against an KRW 8m fixture change, payback is about 1.6 months. That justifies funding and a pilot before the other causes are tackled.
Traps that cost marks
- Jumping to solutions before diagnosis.
- Presenting SWOT as if it were an analysis.
- Confusing MECE with exhaustive reality.
- Recommendations with no owner, metric or timeline.