<p>I got invited for a third round interview with Accenture for a consulting analyst position. What is it like? What questions do they ask? Is there a case study? Any info can help!! Thanks!!</p>
<p>Of course there will be a case study…it is a damn consulting postion; thats what you do.</p>
<p>Consulting is not consulting. The management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) are case-study heavy and cases will be almost all of your interview process. The others (including implementation firms like Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM) have historically not used case studies. The exception is that Accenture and Deloitte have “strategy” positions which usually include case study questions. But if you’re applying for a run-of-the-mill analyst position, it will only be behavioral. I also wouldn’t worry; ACN is hiring anyone with a pulse right now.</p>
<p>To add on, depending on what kind of consulting you are getting into, you might get different types of questions. In implementation firms that also emphasize strategy to a degree, don’t be surprised to get brain teasers (e.g. what is the angle formed by the hands of an analog clock at 3:15 PM?) or more open ended scenarios, as opposed to your typical case studies.</p>
<p>I would recommend Glassdoor.com to get some sense about the interview. Make sure you take note of when the interview took place and the position it was for, and beware of disgruntled applicants who didn’t get offers, but otherwise you can get a decent idea of what you’re walking into.</p>
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<p>lol They certainly advertise that, don’t they?</p>
<p>Unless told otherwise, be prepared for some type of case study. Strategy firms always have them and a lot of management consulting firms use them. </p>
<p>Calling Deloitte, Accenture, and IBM “implementation” firms is ridiculous, btw.</p>
<p>Landing a job at Accenture in a true management consulting role is not easy. Don’t undermine the kid’s opportunity.</p>
<p>That’s exactly what they are: implementation firms. ACN, IBM, et al. do no actual strategy or capability building. Their value proposition is to be able to bring 300 people to your client site and implement a large-scale initiative. Generally they have a set of initiatives they’ve done in the past and they repeatedly apply those initiatives to new firms with some moderate customization.</p>
<p>A strategy position at ACN is exactly the same as a consulting position. The only difference is the title and the pay (about $20,000 more), but you’ll work along side non-strategy consultants doing the same work for the same clients. </p>
<p>It’s not a bad career, at all. But it’s not management consulting and you’ll look ridiculous to others if you say it is.</p>
<p>You will look clueless if you bundle all of Accenture’s consulting roles into one purpose like you are doing. Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC, IBM all have pieces that do ‘real’ management consulting that is not “300 people to your client site and implement a large scale initiative”. </p>
<p>I don’t think you are acknowledging the size of these firms and the number of services that they provide. There is not a single person in those firms (much less an outsider) that can tell you everything their firm is capable of doing. The size of these companies is outrageous and there is almost always a group participating in a space that you would not have known. Is the majority of their work high-level strategy work? No. That is because the work is extremely difficult to come by and MBB have a stranglehold on that piece of the business.</p>
<p>With the bad economy though, MBB moved into more process consulting and the B4, ACN, IBMs of the world ventured into the strategy space. These firms have all expanded looking for a steady revenue stream outside of their stereotypical offerings. </p>
<p>I work for these firms; I go up against them constantly.</p>
<p>First of all, you better know the major offerings of your firm. They hold town hall meetings to go over the firm offerings on a frequent enough basis that anyone with more than a year of tenure should know fairly well what >95% of the services are.</p>
<p>Second, MBB has always been involved in process consulting. Market analysis, operational strategy, change management, M&A management, etc. has always been a part of the MBB business model. What those firms don’t do is actually implement change. They show up with a team of 3-5 consultants, come up with the direction, get management buy-in on their plan, then build capabilities in the firm to complete it themselves or at least draw up a blueprint. Then the company actually implements the change or hires ACN/IBM/Deloitte to do it (and they show up with 300 people to implement the plan written by MBB). It’s a very symbiotic relationship. Without the “thinkers”, the “doers” don’t know the right direction to take. Without the “doers”, the “thinkers” don’t really affect the bottom line. That’s why you’ll see considerable overlap at clients.</p>
<p>Well now wait a second, that isn’t entirely accurate. Friends of mine who work at MBB are on site right now doing implementations. </p>
<p>That said, it is true that the bulk of the work in many boutique firms is in implementing systems. They may make recommendations on HOW to implement a system to make it the most efficient and easiest to use, but if they are hired to implement, say, objective employee review metrics, they are not going to perform research to develop recommendations of what those metrics should look like. It is just going to be implementing the metrics and then going home. Granted, that isn’t the way it always works, but given my own experience and the experience of my peers, I’d say that’s how it works the vast majority of the time.</p>
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<p>They’re not. MBB brings in small teams to build capabilities and look at things like operating strategies. They might coach a client team in implementation, but they will not implement a project. They don’t have the manpower. MBB have about 5,000 consultants (McKinsey is a little bigger at around 8,000). ACN has 245,0000. And ACN only has about 25% more projects than a typical MBB at one time.</p>
<p>Maybe there’s a confusion in wording. If BCG tells a client to expand to China, they will put together the justification and reason, they will build the factors for success in the expansion, and they may visit the Chinese site after it’s running, benchmark it, coach the client on supplier selection, observe the market, and give instruction / guidance to plant management. They’ll likely coach the CXO group at the firm on the implementation and how to manage a business internationally so far from their corporate headquarters. That’s an MBB “implementation”: 4-5 consultants per engagement, 6 weeks per engagement, this might involve 3 or 4 engagements. At the end of the day, the corporation did most of the work and has the internal capabilities to do it again.</p>
<p>If an ACN client is going to China, ACN will sent people to China to find the plant location, negotiate price, supervise the construction of the plant, they’ll design and outfit the plant, they’ll install the IT equipment so plant operation can be monitored from the US, they’ll interview and hire the workers, they’ll write the operating manuals, they’ll train workers on how to run the plant, they’ll monitor the plant when it’s up and running, and they’ll negotiate contracts with suppliers. 200-300 consultants (broken into 4 or 5 subgroups each run by a partner) on the project for 2 years. At the end of the day, ACN did 90+% of the work.</p>
<p>While both of those types of engagements certainly exist and are valid examples for the differences in work between the two companies IN GENERAL, they are not all encompassing. I am in the sales comp world of consulting, and while my company is kind of a jack of all trades (we implement sales comp systems from start to finish and occasionally act as outsourcers; our recommendations involve the specifics on how to manage compensation plans most effectively), the majority of other companies in this realm outsource their implementations to firms such as Accenture, ZS, Deloitte, McKinsey, Bain and BCG. Yes, MBB are in the same conversation. Companies are willing to pay tens of millions to implement and run these kinds of systems because they are losing tens millions due to inefficiencies and inaccuracies in their legacy systems, and the implementations are easy money makers for the big firms. </p>
<p>The friend of mine was doing an implementation (didn’t get any details since his confidentiality agreement is pretty intense) on behalf of an outsourcer. This involved a small team (~5-10 consultants) over a period of 6 months. These types of implementations have become rather common, as the outsourcers recognize that they are good at running systems but don’t have the internal structure to handle implementing them, and the sales comp management industry has exploded in the past 36 months.</p>
<p>You may be familiar with a major aspect of the large firms, but I am intimately familiar with implementations and the work of smaller, more tech heavy consulting firms. Both have their place in the larger consulting world!</p>
<p>Too many generalizations – you are speaking as though there is only one general type of project that the big consulting firms offer; this just isn’t true. A vendor selection and PMO of an implementation is one small piece of the spaces that these firms play.</p>
<p>And it is impossible to know even “95%” of everything a big consulting firm offers. I know service offerings almost three layers deep, but that still doesn’t get me to the 4th and 5th layer that start describing the actual engagements that are being conducted within each of the tiers. I know enough general information about the offerings, but I will never know all of the experts or engagements that exist across the firm. A consultant at a big house can pick up the phone and have literally any business question in existence answered by someone in the company – that is the ridiculous scale these firms possess. It may require a call half-way around the world, but you can still get the answer. Like I said, it is impossible to know every type of service the firm provides.</p>
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<p>You’re going too deep if you’re trying to get to the 3rd and 4th level. It’s about service offerings not specific engagements.</p>
<p>I’ve worked for two firms we’ve already discussed, one in the implementation space and one in the management space. I can tell you 95% of what both firms do. In fact, I was required to know that information in the event that I saw an opportunity for another functional area at the client site or in case I need to seek expert advice.</p>
<p>General service offerings should be known…but they are just that “general”. I would have zero problems putting someone in touch with another professional in one of those groups when it is something outside of my area. When in doubt, the answer is going to be “we have someone that can do that”.</p>