Down On Consulting

I am working as an internal IT consultant for the past 2 years. Typically you dont bill the hours you travel neither the extra hours you sit in office to finish regular work. But if you work on weekends or are on call then you bill these hrs. If you travel to other client locations for official purpose then you are generally expected to reach there well in time to have normal working day..if it involves a lot of travel then you get to bill those hours but if its a place which is say 2 hrs from the one you work you normally travel early in morning work 8 hrs and travel back late in evening.

I have traditionally worked on fixed price (not time & expense) projects, so my answer is a little bit irrelevant to this question. But I do report travel time, including delays, and us consultants are even asked to mark it as travel time.

Although this information is not necessarily relevant to my client, it is certainly relevant to my firm for two reasons:
- We track hours to make sure that our consultants are not working unreasonable hours (daily, weekly, or monthly). The presumption is that high hours reports are the fault of management, not the consultant, and management must work to make those hours more sustainable.
- Travel is understandably taxing, particularly over the long term. We track both hours spent working outside the home office as well as nights spent away from home. Consultants who travel extensively are considered priority for the next low-travel project.

It varies across the board. A good friend worked at Accenture, and they had fixed fee engagements so he was never billing per hour. At my firm, we bill by the hour but it still varies. If the client is in bankruptcy (I work in turnaround management), we know the court won't approve the bill we submit for travel time. That always gets pulled out, but we submit the bill regardless.

We track our time by the quarter hour for clients outside of bankruptcy, and by the tenth of an hour for those in bankruptcy. The court appointed trustee reviews all professional fee applications, and it's required by the tenth of an hour.

What's funny is it makes our time recording less accurate, because you don't want them trying to match up detailed time logs with the person you said you're in a meeting with, or the client. One of many examples of good intended but very poor legislation.

It is possible to get into a major management consultancy firm at 34? Is age a recruitment criteria?

Your age wont be a concern. Mostly because they dont really care, but really because it would be illegal if they did.

I was asking the same question at 25, and the answer was no. They tend to take people right out of undergrad or business school. Instead I found a small firm focused on turnaround management and absolutely love it. Point being, there are many more small consulting firms out there than you would imagine, and you'd probably enjoy working at some of them. They may be easier to break into given your background and their focus, so be open to that idea. It can be a segway into a larger firm later if you'd like, with some consulting experience now on your resume.

I don't work for a large firm though, so someone may correct me on this.

Edit: I know several people that came out of business school with no experience, and got jobs at major firms. They weren't 34, but close.

i meant getting into a MC firm after completing MBA at 34 without any prior MC experience...

A doctor can prescribe all she wants, but a patient will never get better unless he actually takes the medicine.

Anyone been to scribd.com?

You wont believe what you can find there. Try a search for mkinsey for example. I wont link directly to it, cause im not so sure all that stuff isnt copyrighted, but you can find a lot of stuff there. Complete wetfeet guides... etc. Or try a search for "MBA".

thanks rhyme, now i can look busy staring at my monitor all day.

Bingo, but a great doctor will convince the patient to take the medicine and then monitor their progress.

But if you didn't drink and smoke so much, you probably wouldn't have gotten sick in the first place.

Yeah, they even have the full text of the 911 Commission Report. Great database.

Yeah, but those substance abuse problems are probably the result of issues that started in early childhood.

Enough with the analogies people! We get the point!



lol!! Business jargon?! Where? When?

Edit: lol, i'm probably offending someone, i'll edit this out.