Consulting Lessons Learned 7: Quality first, speed second
Think about this: As an aspiring consultant – what will be more important for your job manager? Quality or Speed?
When you start in consulting, you should always start with a strong focus on quality and then build-up your set of routines and efficiency hacks to increase your working speed to the required level.
Many consulting new hires make this mistake: They are bombarded with tasks and are mainly focusing on delivering them as quickly as possible instead of really thinking through their work entirely to reach the best quality.
However, also the time of your job manager to manage you is limited. If your job manager gets the impression, he/she has to recalculate every calculation you did or challenge every analysis, the perceived value of your work will be close to zero.
If you get the reputation of not delivering high-quality work, no one will want to work together with you. However, if you can deliver quality work, but are just still a bit slow, this will not really harm your reputation in the beginning. Everyone will understand that it’s just a matter of time until you will get used to the working routines to increase your speed.
