What are your biggest challenges as an IT consultant?

Being an IT consultant means having your work cut out occasionally. The work is interesting and exciting yet often challenging. 

The IT consulting sector faces a myriad of challenges due to a number of factors including economic issues, rapid technological advancements, and customers having more demands from the services they pay for. 

Staying ahead of the curve when adopting digital technologies is essential. Let’s face it – a business should adapt to changes and make use of the latest technology in order to stay on track. However, this process may be a few times harder without professional help. IT consultants are the experts providing external help when it comes to digital transformations. IT consulting firms support their clients in many ways such as assisting in formulating business models, helping to cut expenses, predict risks, strengthen working processes, and stay compliant, and recruiting staff. As we can clearly see, while the global economy seems to be slowing due to the latest events, the tech consulting industry keeps experiencing robust growth as well as facing more pressure than ever before.

Taking all the drastic changes into account, IT consulting specialists have to deal with a growing number of challenges and problems if they are to remain successful. 

But there’s no reason for panic. Forewarned is forearmed, right? Having a clear understanding of what’s waiting for you gives you a precious opportunity to plan and prepare. That is why we’ve compiled a list of some key challenges an IT consultant may face. Being aware of them makes you, as a specialist, more flexible and adaptable. So now, let’s take a closer look at the most challenging moments of working as a tech consultant. 

Keeping up with the latest technology trends

One of the biggest challenges for an IT consultant is staying up to date with the latest technology trends and advancements. The field of IT is constantly evolving and ever-changing, so new technologies are emerging all the time. Due to the tendency of projects to rise in complexity, an IT consultant is supposed to be knowledgeable enough about the industry, have access to cutting-edge technology, and know how to solve any issues on the spot. To stay relevant, you need to keep your skills and knowledge current. 

Ensuring customer satisfaction

Delivering a result that completely meets the customer’s expectations is the ultimate goal for an IT consulting firm. However, the problematic thing is that often a customer himself does not really know which solution works out best for the project. That is why a seasoned IT consultant should always carefully listen to a client. It takes to conduct a thorough requirement analysis in order to develop the exact solution in the end. Remember that 50% of success is achieved in the first 10% of the project. 

Bringing in digital transformation

As for now, digital transformation is among the top business priorities. As various industries keep evolving at a frantic pace and the market getting more competitive, it seems quite logical. Still, implementing new technologies can be very tedious and time-consuming. A big challenge for many organizations lies in the successful introduction of new technology within their business. To cope with this task, a seasoned tech consultant requires an effective change management strategy. During the entire cooperation, an expert should provide a clear answer to the question “what’s in it for me?” thus explaining all the benefits of digitalization and then start training the employees with the offered innovative solutions. 

Dealing with changing client behavior

Customers paying for professional services have recently become more demanding than ever before. Now a vast majority of them require ​​fixed fees with maximum transparency on costs. As industries turn extremely agile due to the latest digital innovations, clients expect more value, a higher quality of work, and faster delivery of solutions and services. 

One more change caused by the financial crisis is the need for higher transparency and accountability in the work delivered. Well, this can be explained logically – enterprises had to cut down on their external consulting expenses and therefore start monitoring the value provided by tech consultants with a bigger interest than before.

Referring to Insight to Action – The Future of the Professional Services Industry by Deltek, these are the top challenges resulting from changing client behavior:

Tackling interpreting tasks

An IT consultant is a kind of bond between managers, engineers, and developers. To a certain extent, this person simplifies their communication and makes things clear to every party. That is why in long discussions with the development team, a consultant has to be able to explain everything down to the code level, but when it comes to stakeholders, they should speak short and straight to the point. This means interpreting technical jargon into simple language clear to the customer. This, however, takes to possess extensive technical and industry knowledge.

The security factor

IT consulting firms hold an enormous amount of private client data, be it strategic, commercial, or personal information. And the more data you hold, the more risks of breaches and/or losses there are. That is why professional service firms have more chances to become targets for hackers.

To reduce this risk, an IT consulting firm should consider migrating data to the cloud. This, in turn, allows for:

• Ongoing data monitoring
• Detecting breaches before they happen
• Providing reliable security measurements

Project complexity

Providing tech consulting services is getting more challenging than ever before! With the rapid development of technologies, clients are now demanding more out of their projects. Now they want everything to be done faster, more efficiently and to tighter budgets. By sticking to this, consultants still have to completely satisfy customer needs.

As clients obtain better insight into their projects and demand more control, the project complexity level keeps rising respectively. And it comes with a cost, too. With a lot of unforeseen changes, it gets harder to plan a budget in advance. The project complexity is very likely to take the first place in the list of the top operational challenges. To cope with this, clients need a clear vision of their projects in terms of expenses, deadlines, risks, required resources, and revenues so consultants can focus their resources appropriately and enhance efficiency.

What the consulting industry statistics can tell us 

The overall consulting industry has been growing persistently over previous years. This is caused by the global business reorganization and rising demand for consulting services when it comes to new models and solutions implementation. 

The consulting industry is represented by a large number of firms of various sizes. A 2023 report by IBISWorld estimates that there are approximately 901,751 consulting firms in the United States alone; however, the vast majority of them are small businesses, with only few large consulting firms dominating the industry.

Due to a Statista report, the global digital transformation market growth will lead to many consulting firms shifting their focus to digital consulting services.

IT consulting is among the key consulting industry sectors. Referring to a report by IBISWorld, IT consulting in the US alone was worth around $426 billion in 2020, with an annual growth rate of 3.5% from 2016 to 2021. And the sector is very likely to grow even bigger over the upcoming years due to the increasing demand for cloud computing, big data analytics, and cybersecurity services.

Has remote work changed the industry direction?

Of course, it has. Remote work has had a significant impact on the consulting industry, both in terms of how consultants work and how they interact with clients. But what if we say that consultants started benefiting from remote work? Consulting is a relationship business but numerous studies prove that a large portion of consultants worldwide benefited from the pandemic. In fact, they even claimed remote consulting was a booming business. There was no need to lower fees as clients pay for high-quality results, not a consultant’s physical presence. 

Remote work has made it to a huge global trend so now a vast majority of clients prefer remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions. This, in turn, allows consultants to expand the territory for their services and cut business development costs (trips, hotel stays if necessary, etc.). Apart from these, there are a few more things that have reshaped the consulting industry to a certain extent and brought a positive effect. 

Digital transformation has caused an extremely high demand for consulting services. Remote work has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies and forced businesses to rethink their approach to digital transformation. Consulting firms have been playing a key role in helping companies to build and implement new digital strategies to enable remote work, navigate changing market conditions, enhance cybersecurity, and improve overall efficiency.

A shift towards outcome-based consulting has happened, too. With remote work, consulting firms are increasingly being held accountable for delivering measurable outcomes and results rather than simply providing advice so consultants are incentivized to deliver specific business outcomes rather than just recommendations.

To conclude

Working as an IT consultant has always been challenging but the challenges have got bigger and more serious over the few past years due to the rising demand for digital consulting services and clients being pickier. Yet this work can be both challenging and rewarding. The challenges can vary depending on the specific area of expertise and the type of clients you work with. However, the biggest challenge for an IT consultant is to stay up to date with the latest technology trends while balancing multiple projects and meeting client expectations. Effective communication and collaboration skills, the ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues quickly, and effective time and resource management are also critical for success in this field.