Guy Watmore is an experienced consultant with PwC working on a complex multi-national project which has been named as a finalist in the MCA Awards. As a chartered management consultant he says he is ‘jealous’ of the graduates who are just starting with the firm.
Guy said:
“I am jealous of the graduates now who are getting to start on their chartership from day one. It is such a powerful tool to make them more effective in their job, in the market place and for the business. I wish I had had the opportunity to start chartered from the beginning.”
He was one of the first consultants at PwC to go for chartered when his firm offered it. The focus it has given his career he believes in one of the things that has allowed him to take on a project as complex and vast as the one short-listed.
It is with the Swiss firm, ABB, a multinational high-end manufacturing company at the forefront of robotics and cutting edge technology. ABB have shifted from a country operating model to one focused around their divisions. They therefore needed a Finance function that operated without boundaries, underpinned by 1 Finance ERP and a Unified Data Model. He said:
“The scale of it is huge. We are leveraging experience from various previous projects including my last one, a similar transformation across 30 countries. But that was across Europe only. Now this is a global project which is clearly the next level up. From Europe to Australia to the Middle East to the Americas. It is a big beast but so far we are on track 18/19 months in.”
Chartered, he feels, has given him the perspective to take on such a complex and challenging task. He said:
“I was one of the first people to do chartered at PwC. I was about eight or nine years into my consultancy career. It had been a great journey but I hadn’t ever taken the time to stop and think about what it meant, where I was strong and where there were areas to work on. How to apply my skills and learning in a more effective and structured way.”
The competency framework, and its focus on ethics, has proved particularly beneficial going forward. He said:
“On this project you have to make a lot of difficult decisions but the fact that so much of chartered is based on ethics has been good preparation for me. When you start to ask yourself ‘am I doing the right thing by my client, my team, my people?’. Even if it didn’t work did I think it was the right thing to do? Making ethics-based decisions begins to happen more and more naturally. Everything we do is about client delivery but we also have to protect our own business. Having a structure and a framework about how you make those decisions has been a massive, massive help to be. I will be really honest – I wish I had had it when I started.”
The value of Chartered, Guy believes, is becoming more obvious to clients. He said:
“As a general concept they understand the value of chartership. It is one of those things as it continues to mature, as you see with a chartered accountant, I think you will begin to see it more and more valued in consultancy. There is awareness there which will build over time and that can only be a good thing.”
For more information on the Associate award, go to www.mca.org.uk/chartered-management-consultant-award