Once upon a time…
Joel and I met in 2008 on the first launch of PwCs new consulting graduate scheme.
With wide eyes and a good dose of naivety, we bonded over the potential of taking the business world by storm. The cutting edge advice we weren’t going to provide wasn’t worth worrying about.
Our thorough and comprehensive induction was a 6 week training programme. Partly based in London, partly in Swindon, with most days digested that evening in the pub.
As part of that programme, I vividly remember being given a CD (yes an actual physical CD) that was the PwC project management toolkit. I’ve desperately searched for this to share a picture but as of yet to no avail.
What was this magic? Surely it must be this incredible app built by PwC to make managing projects a dream?
Insert into drive. Hear whirring.
Oh! It’s just a folder structure. There must be something to install it in one of these folders.
Open folder.
Oh, it’s a list of powerpoint and excel files.
Is that it?
Templates. An entire cd of ppt and excel templates.
Is this what consultants call a toolkit……?
A few weeks later…
CD disappointment dissipated, we moved on.
The programme climaxed in a mock project presentation to a role playing client.
You can probably picture the night before. Endless revisions of what to say. Caffeinated energy driving circular debate.
And of course, powerpoint.
But this wasn’t any old powerpoint.
This was our very first introduction to the medieval torture technique that is fixing up a powerpoint the night before a presentation.
From that night on, we knew life would be a bit different now - we just didn’t quite know how.
And so it carried on…
It turned out ‘the how’ was spending unimaginable amounts of our lives battling our way through tools that were built for other people.
Other people who’s workflows overlapped with some of what we did, but never quite enough for things to just work. We’d always need the consulting workaround for everything from Jira to Indesign to Visio to whatever else. And because of that 9 times out of 10 we’d resort to powerpoint, excel and word.
We got into consulting to do the hard thinking, intellectually demanding, clever, change the course of a businesses life stuff. Not the arguing over spreadsheet columns, font sizing and arrow alignment stuff.
And whilst lots happened between those first few weeks and the last couple of years, the seeds were sown way back then.
As consultants we are adaptable. We do it because we’re able to overcome all sorts of obstacles and barriers to find a way to get the job done and done well. We’re prepared to suffer the pain and frustration to get a great result for our clients.
But from tricky stakeholders, blocked diaries, swinging changes to scope and unrealistic timelines there are endless ways to suffer.
We’d just like to remove the tools you have to use from that list.
I do quite like the idea of there being a Discy CD though.