She is young, speaks with a soft
Irish voice, and, at 6 p.m. still seems conspicuously enthusiastic at a time of
day when many of us are beginning to get a little frazzled and impatient. Jill Holohan lets Leo Benedictus into the
working life of a management consultant.
Like all the best secret agents, Jill
Holohan does not look like a secret agent. "We spend most of our time on the client
side," she explains, bustling politely back into her own premises, taking
off her coat and depositing her laptop in an abandoned meeting room. "So
during the week, especially Monday to Thursday, we tend to be out of the
office. Then we try to come back here on a Friday so that we're actually talking
to each other, and so we actually get to know our colleagues." This is the nomadic reality of management
consulting: living life as the outsider in someone else's office, with clients
instead of colleagues and a laptop instead of a desk.
What Holohan is paid to do, in a
nutshell, is to help other businesses solve their problems. If this makes her sound like a hitman, then
the comparison is not always so inaccurate. Taking the decision to recommend
redundancies - "streamlining" or "downsizing" as the mythic
parlance has it - may well become a management consultant's unpleasant duty. Fear and loathing, from many of those close
by, are just the perks of the job.
Managing
client relationships
Naturally, Holohan and her colleagues
do their best to blend in with their clients. "If they're a casual company we'll come
in and wear casual clothes," she says. "And we try and mix up where we sit and
make sure we're sitting with client people as opposed to being put in a
consultant room in the basement, hidden out of sight. So we do make a lot of effort to make friends
with people we're working with." And
indeed her employer’s own office, in which we are sitting, seems almost
deliberately to lack a personality of its own.
Right now the place is nearly empty too - not because it is six o'clock,
I am assured, but because everyone is busy blending in elsewhere.
And yet sometimes it is best to keep
one's distance. "If you're doing
something that could really challenge the status quo or potentially challenge
somebody's job," Holohan explains, "then there are always going to be
sensitivities. And it makes it harder to
be buddy-buddy with people you're working on a project with if you're
potentially going to be making their job redundant. So there are limitations to how friendly you
can be."
Does that make her feel awkward? "It does," she says, sounding
awkward. "But you just have to get
on with it ... If you're looking at making a particular team redundant, you
will try and isolate the project team slightly from them. So you may have some of the client people
within your team, but you're not necessarily involving them on a day-to-day
basis, because that's kind of rubbing salt in the wounds." So, if there are management consultants in
your company and they seem to be keeping away from you? "That's always a bad sign."
When millions of pounds are at stake,
of course, such secrecy is taken very seriously indeed. "In some cases, a client might ask us to
work here if they really didn't want us to be seen on site," Holohan says.
"And sometimes they'll get us to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so that
we can't even talk to our colleagues here about what we're doing."
All this cloak and dagger stuff may
be perfectly sensible, of course, but is it not quite fun too? "Yeah." She does not sound convinced. "It gives it a bit more of a buzz. But it depends on what it is really. Sometimes it's confidential just for political
reasons, but actually the subject matter isn't that exciting. It's confidential, but you're like, 'Yeah, but
nobody else really cares anyway." Now she laughs out loud.
Outstandingly
inspiring outcomes
Far more thrilling than the secrecy
itself, it seems, is the moment of relief when the client finally makes their
project public. "It's like a whole
pressure being lifted from your shoulders," she sighs. "Suddenly you can engage with the people
around you. You can chat to people,
which you haven't been able to do as much previously." She sips her Diet
Coke, and visibly relaxes.
Holohan became a consultant four
years ago, joining a company that was bought by Navigant last summer. After finishing a business degree in Dublin,
she had worked for five years in fund management, but became bored. "A lot of my friends had worked in
consulting and I thought I'd give it a go," she says. "I think consulting is the type of thing
that is exciting to come into in your mid-20s, because it involves a bit of
travel, working with a lot of people your age, and meeting a lot of new people
all the time. The hours are long, but
you probably don't have kids and aren't married at that stage."
Now aged 29, the project she is
currently working on, naturally, is confidential – which makes me immediately
want to know what it is. So, I ask her
to think of another example to explain what she actually does all day - an area
of vagueness, in many people's eyes, where management consultants are
concerned. "I'm trying to think of
one that will actually sound interesting to the outside world," Holohan
murmurs. "They're all interesting to us."
Then she comes up with one. "One
of the things I did last year was with a financial services company who wanted
to set up a new division," she begins. "They had an idea to bring a
new product to market, and they decided they were going to set up an office in
a city in England. So they said to us,
'What people do we need to have in that building when we set up this new
product? What do they need to do? And how many people do you think we need to
run that?'
'So that's a problem where you start
with a blank page. It's like selling
apples. I guess people will phone up and
say they want to buy an apple, so you need somebody to answer that phone. Then you need them to input on to the
computer, one transaction for an apple. And
you need some way to bring money in, so do you set up an automated cash payment
system? And do you need anyone to sit
and manage the processes around that? You
have to think of this office building, and whatever they need to do to bring
this product to market, break down all the processes within it, and then figure
out, well, how many apples are they going to sell in year one?"
Holohan's company deals only with
financial services, of course, not apples, but the principle, she says, is no
different. And seeing her ideas travel
all the way from the drawing board to the real world can be just as fun. "I spent a year and a half with a client
in Scotland," she remembers. "I started off, day one, in a room with
three or four of the client's directors, with a flipchart and a few coloured
pens. Then a year and a half later it
was a massive product that went to market. That's really gratifying."
The dark
cloud within the silver lining
For all the work Holohan puts in,
however, she still has to accept that when the time comes for a decision, it is
not hers to make. "At the end of
the day it's the client's company," she shrugs. "We try to give them all the information,
and try to facilitate them making what we think is the right decision ... But
sometimes there will be other things that maybe you're not party to, like
certain politics within the firm. Or
there may be an allegiance between this company and another company that may
drive a decision in a certain way. Even
though you know it's the wrong decision ... You can explain the impact, but you
can't tell them what to do." Her
voice is climbing steeply up a cliff of frustration.
Do things get heated at times? "Not really," she says. "You can come out of a meeting and bang
your head against a brick wall, but we're very disciplined about not getting
heated with the client. That takes quite
a lot of discipline sometimes, especially if you've been working on something
for months, and you feel it should go one way, and you feel the client is not
making a great decision."
The stress in her voice is rising
again, but she calms herself quickly, like someone who has had plenty of
practice. "It can be
stressful," she concludes. "You have to be good at managing that
stress. And realising that it's only a
job."