The evolution of design consulting.

I have been fortunate enough to spend the last 8 years working as a service design consultant for some of the Big 4 and as a freelancer across the UK and Australia, and I have witnessed the evolution of design consulting within professional services firsthand. As I am just about to kick start a new chapter at EY Canada, I wanted to reflect on some of my learnings and discuss the value and pitfalls of 1) traditional consulting design projects, 2) contractual design work and 3) a consortium of consultancies working as a single multi-disciplinary team.

My goal is always to help everyone think and act like a designer, and hopefully, my insights will be helpful for any designers out there considering a career in the Big 4 or as a freelancer within professional services.

1) The traditional design consulting project.

More often than not, transformational work is divided into buckets of money across functions, leaving the functional sponsor/decision-maker to select a consulting team to execute the work. In traditional design-led consulting projects, a single design team is tasked with rigid outcomes and deliverables, and a list of key stakeholders to engage.

In my experience, this form of design consulting can only be successful if the problem and outcomes have been continuously tested internally and have total buy-in from everyone in the business. As designers, we are as much problem-setters as we are problem solvers, and sometimes the exam question…