Services
Management consulting
Management consulting is expert support for a company’s leadership: it clarifies where the business is heading and removes obstacles to growth. At Sofokus, consulting is business-driven digital development. We define the target state and roadmap with your leadership team, and we can also turn the plan into software and digital services.
Kärävä
From clarified goals and strategy to B2B digital commerce for the wood products industry
“We now have more flexibility to do everything we want in short term, and are ready to adapt to anything the future brings.”
What does a management consultant actually do?
The goal of management consulting is to help your company succeed. A consultant helps the leadership team pause, spot what matters and see things in a new light, and makes sure every voice in the leadership team is heard. Facilitated sparring often produces fresh perspectives and moves existing ideas forward.
Typical goals include launching an entirely new line of business, updating the business strategy, securing sound financial development and building the skills of your people.
Our consulting brings business, digital technology and people together in a way that strengthens your competitiveness.
What the work covers
Measurable results
Our management consulting engagements often include elements such as:
- Digital transformation
- Involving leadership and stakeholders
- Customer-centred design thinking
- Modern remote and hybrid working tools
- Assessing digital maturity
- Measurable business outcomes
- Better data-driven management
- An experimental strategy culture
- A stronger competitive edge
Longer partnerships often start with consulting
Management consulting is a natural place to start working together. Few companies want to begin with a large technology project, and as a supplier we need to understand how your business works before any technology project starts. Organisations that come to us have usually recognised that they need help with a change, such as digitalising their operations, or with a strategic initiative, such as taking digital services deeper into their core business.
Today, management consulting is often delivered in a hybrid format, partly on site and partly remotely. Nothing beats a proper conversation in person, but modern remote tools make it easier for busy clients to run effective workshops. A brainstorm on virtual sticky notes across several offices works well remotely, as long as an experienced consultant facilitates it.
We sought a partner fluent in both business strategy and coding expertise.
Management consulting or business design?
Done in a modern way, management consulting is in fact business design. Our starting point is that a future-oriented organisation invests in raising its digital maturity and in putting customers or its wider ecosystem at the centre.
Customer-driven thinking starts from the fact that user and market needs change faster and faster, driven by trends such as digitalisation. In strategy work, the traditional five-year plan has largely given way to building a more adaptable business. You have to be able to adjust to market needs ever more quickly.
Modern management consulting involves every relevant stakeholder in shaping how the business works.
Lead with data, but dare to experiment
Data-driven management can sound complicated, but at heart it is practical: identifying the sources of information you already have and finding new ones. Companies typically already run several information systems and other data sources, yet make little use of them in decision-making. Ecosystem thinking, for example, can be an effective exercise for identifying and developing data sources.
Encouraging experimentation is one of the key ways to make an organisation strategically more agile and to refresh how people think. An experimentation culture requires psychological safety: people need to feel they can try things without being penalised for mistakes. Once that willingness grows, it creates a mindset of continuous improvement that values small, concrete wins, because over time they add up to stronger competitiveness.
Alongside customer focus, the key to a more adaptive strategy and the ability to execute it lies in data-driven management and an experimentation culture.
Learned from client feedback
What good consulting looks like
We ask every consulting client for feedback and use it to improve our services. This is what clients value most in well-run consulting:
No jargon
We speak plain language and avoid consultant-speak.
A human approach
Everyone involved is heard and included.
Everyday work changes
The change becomes visible to everyone and guides how work is done from then on.
Building on strengths
Your competitive edge is distilled and made concrete.
Value from digital
Software and systems produce more measurable business value.
How we work
Management consulting helps you challenge the usual ways of working
We help companies take a critical look at their own business and find solutions to its challenges and development needs. We are practical and believe in the power of working together. We challenge you to think and to question established habits and models.
Instead of ready-made answers, we look for solutions together with your leadership and your own experts, and we use workshops extensively in our consulting projects. Our clients are growth-hungry companies of any size and industry.
Our management consulting services
We use methods and tools proven over time, but we always tailor management consulting to the needs of the client organisation. The challenges are often specific to an industry; the solutions are always specific to a company. One of our goals is to strengthen your competitive edge, and that takes more than standard solutions.
Because the work is tailored, its focus varies a lot. Here are some of the services and approaches we have used to help our clients:
Frequently asked questions about management consulting
A management consultant helps a company’s leadership identify the most important development needs in the business and make decisions about them. In practice, the consultant runs workshops where the views of leadership and stakeholders are brought together into a shared plan. In Sofokus engagements, business, digital technology and people are part of the same work, and where needed it includes service design or technical consulting.
Strategy consulting typically focuses on a company’s competitive position, markets and organisational structure. Sofokus management consulting focuses on changes delivered through digital services and data, such as digitalising operations or improving data-driven management. The resulting plan can serve as the starting point for a later technology project when you want to put it into practice.
The price depends on the scope of the work. You get a quote once you have told us about your company’s situation. You can ask for a quote through our Contact us page.
Management consulting is most useful in a period of change when the leadership team does not yet share a view of the first steps. The change might be digitalising operations, launching a new business or updating the strategy. Consulting is also a natural way to start working together, as few companies want to begin with a large technology project.
After the consulting work, the company has a target state and a roadmap that it can deliver on its own, put out to tender or take forward with Sofokus. If the next step is a digital service or system, the work continues with technical consulting and software development. Many of our longer client relationships start with consulting.
Yes. In an AI opportunity assessment, Sofokus identifies the core processes where AI would add the most value and prioritises the use cases in line with the organisation’s strategy. The work is done in workshops with the people responsible for those processes, and the result includes an implementation plan, a technical specification and a risk management plan.
Get in touch
Tell us about your project, and let’s talk more. We’ll go through your organisation’s situation and goals and assess together where the project should start.