Management Consulting

Bardwrite staff members have more than 35 years of combined management-level experience of technical publications departments within IT businesses in the United States. Chief Consultant and Managing Director, Tom Fitzgerald, has an MSc in International Management and a Sloan Fellowship from the London Business School at the University of London. He has recently consulted for companies including Nortel Networks, Concert, and British Telecom.

Management consulting services

Bardwrite offers consulting services in the following areas:

• Business analysis
  Identify the contribution being made by Technical Publications to the company's overall goals. Present this information in graphical, management-friendly slides for senior management.
• Restructuring
  Identify logical structure in a publications group and select managers for each section to increase productivity and efficiency.
• Personnel issues
  Resolve interdepartmental misunderstandings by analysing, identifying, and correcting personnel issues.
• Budget analysis
  Quantify costs associated with various functions, create metrics that allow department managers to track efficiency and cost increases, and remove metrics that generate misleading results.

Case Study: Management consulting

A client's writing group in California was out of step with the goals of their other writing groups around the country. Tension was building between this group and the others. A Bardwrite consultant was called in. He spent one week working with the group speaking to all of the writers, editors, and managers. He analysed the group's finances and spoke to the top engineering executives that were supported by this group.

The Bardwrite management consultant was able to explain to the engineering group how this particular organisation fit into the overall picture and clarify what could and could not be done locally. This removed the local pressure to go against standard publications policy and allowed them to work in concert with the overall publications group.

Once the local publications management knew how they fitted into the larger publications group, change became the natural choice, and was welcomed (see quote in the right-hand column). A concise report was provided to the publications director, and the problems disappeared in less than two weeks.