A new approach to consultancy for a new time

In this article, Charlene reflects on the Association of Consultancy and Engineering’s (ACE’s) successful Future of Consultancy launch and explains the background to Accelar’s own guiding principles.

Before Accelar Limited was launched, and before we even knew what it would be called, we worked on what the guiding principles would be for the business. As a new company we naturally wanted to start afresh and challenge our own thinking.  We reflected on how strategies for resilient, clean growth could be recognised and mainstreamed by clients more quickly and effectively.  Listening and learning from others including the ACE’s emerging work on the ‘Future of Consultancy’, we considered how we could work to be at the forefront of practice including in how we operate (such as harnessing digitalisation and automation) and how we provide value and outputs for our clients. And so we adopted three guiding principles for Accelar:

1.       Advising clients to accelerate positive outcomes (i.e. productivity, sustainability, decarbonisation and resilience).

2.       Offering to work on the basis of delivering tangible outcomes and value as relevant to the task in hand (e.g. a meaningful element of “risk-reward”).

3.       Being fair to people and the planet, for example providing good working arrangements for staff, and collaborating with other organisations who do the same.

On 15 October Charlene went to the ACE’s Future of Consultancy launch. In recognition of the “winds of change” in the air, the event was well attended by colleagues across the infrastructure and built environment industry, including start-ups, SMEs and large international consultancies, contractors and asset owners.

Reflecting on the event, Charlene notes that “society is highly motivated to see more from infrastructure investment, not least to improve the day to day user experience and address the climate and environmental emergency.  There is great opportunity for the industry to reap and deliver the benefits of a more outcome and value focussed approach. To meet this challenge the industry will have to embrace a wide-ranging shift, from how we look at bring new people into the industry through to signing different forms of contracts. We will also need to work as an industry to understand how natural capital, as a measure for value set out in the Strategy, is delivered”.

We look forward to playing our part in realising the potential of the Future of Consultancy.