The Hindu Business Line : Five ways for consultants to improve business performance

YOU would agree that business is not what it used to be. "It used to be that a manager got up, arrived at (invariably) his office, managed the same processes, ticked the same boxes, talked to the same staff, day in and day out," recapitulates Management Consulting in Practice by Fiona Czerniawska and Paul May, from Kogan Page (www.vivagroupindia.com).

Well, not so any longer, and so you would need to look at this collection of `award-winning international case studies'.

Such as: Customers driving local services, a new digital city every two years, electronic payments for 13 million citizens, diagnosing and treating workforce ailments, knowledge portal to close the deprivation gap, releasing the future from the present, and so forth.

But what is management consultancy? It is "the creation of value for organisations, through the application of knowledge, techniques and assets, to improve performance". To achieve this, you need consultants providing objective advice and business implementing the solutions.

Work of genuine consultants is to improve business performance, remind the authors, listing five ways in which such help comes through. One, seeing the wood for the trees, or pinpointing the underlying cause of a problem.

Two, still seeing the trees, by cutting out "as much of the white noise as possible that typically surrounds a business problem".

Three, know-how and knowing how to implement it because "the skill of the consultant does not just lie in bringing a briefcase full of techniques to a given problem, but in knowing which are appropriate and how to apply them".

Four, passing the baton from the consultant to the client, achieved through `skills transfer'. And five, providing incentives for change by involving "as many people in the process as possible, giving them a stake in the solution".

Compelling read on consulting.

Get your feet wet

THE real costs of irrigation through new large public schemes have significantly gone up, writes Joachim von Braun, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute in his foreword to Institutional Reforms in Indian Irrigation by Ashok Gulati, Ruth Meinzen-Dick and K.V. Raju, a book from Sage Publications (www.indiasage.com).

Braun draws attention to a shocking statistic that "water tariff does not cover even one-fifth of the operational and maintenance expenses, not to talk of any capital costs".

If you are wondering why accountants should get their feet wet in a discussion of irrigation, it may help to note that the focus of the book is on "the financial and operational aspects of major and medium canal irrigation, the problems, and the options to turn them around".

Isn't this an area that should interest number crunchers with an economic bias?

The authors inform that during the tail-end years of the British Raj in India, the criterion for undertaking any productive canal irrigation was to have at least 6 per cent return on capital.

Yet, "during 1941-45, in the Punjab region, canal irrigation provided a 17 per cent financial return on capital".

In a chapter on policy recommendations, the book reveals that Indian peasants have been paying a net implicit tax of nearly one-third the value of their agricultural produce, "even after accounting for various subsidies on inputs, including irrigation".

"The question of whether this implicit tax is consciously imposed to recover irrigation costs or to transfer income from peasantry to other sections of society remains wide open."

Essential inputs to avert `impending financial drought', I would suggest.

For better managed contracts

WITH important additions to topics on tendering and procurement, here comes the second edition of B. S. Ramaswamy's Contracts and their Management, from LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.co.in). On the importance of `notices', the author writes that during the course of implementation of the contract, it becomes necessary for the parties to issue communications to each other from time to time.

"For example, notice of occurrence and cessation of force majeure events, notice of readiness of items for shipment, notice of default and so on."

Therefore, ensure that you have a clause in your contract furnishing the address and fax numbers of the parties to which notices have to be sent.

"As there could be a time lag between the despatch and the receipt of communications, this clause also lays down the deemed time of receipt."

A book that deserves your notice!

BooksOfAccount@TheHindu.co.in

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