McDonnell-Phillips

innovation and continuity since 1992

Our philosophy and Business Principles

Our philosophy

At the heart of our company philosophy is the belief that our long-term success is tied directly to the long-term success of our clients and we respect the importance of issues entrusted to us by our clients. We expect and encourage long-term associations, with our clients, consultants and suppliers. We place emphasis on identifying and achieving the outcomes our clients need and in providing value for money.

We are focused on excellent service and dedicated to meeting our client's objectives and surpassing their expectations.  We always deliver what is promised. As an advisor to your business, it is critical that we have a thorough understanding of your organisation, how you operate within your market, and the internal culture of your business. Working in partnership, we develop this understanding to achieve the best possible outcomes.

For us, quality consulting work comes first. This is reflected in our people, systems and investments in staying at the forefront of our field and in the quality of our methods.  We make sure that our work is both timeless and useful, not only in the short term, but for years to come. We develop a unique and bespoke approach for each issue, review, research or planning need.

Our objective is to deliver WHAT our clients want, HOW they want it.

We ensure that our technical business focus is enhanced by a commitment to delivering value adding to our clients. This recognises that technical excellence is only part of the reason for earning client preference. Service excellence and the way our clients experience doing business with us is also as important. We make sure that it is easy for clients to work with us.

How we go about providing “service” to our clients in a strategic sense involves:

  • addressing the foundations of effective communications - building relationships, gathering robust and defensible evidence, providing relevant information and seeing things from our clients’ perspective
  • encouraging dialogue and two-way information flows
  • having a systematic way of project scoping, quality control, project management and feedback from our clients
  • treating all people consulted with warmth, respect and sensitivity
  • having systems and processes to guarantee that client information is held in the strictest of confidence (and disposed of once the project is complete).

We work in partnership with our clients to create independence rather dependencies - we seek out ways to build in-house capacity and ability through skills transfer to clients' staff rather than create reliance on our team.

Business principles

The core principles that guide the philosophies and directions of our practice include - we:

  • make sure that we spend our own time building an understanding of our clients business and the factors that influence them so that we know our client’s businesses as well as we know our own
  • make regular two-way value adding contact with our clients
  • ALWAYS keep our promises to clients, unless clients change conditions
  • customise our service offerings to the individual client’s need rather than trying to fit the client’s need to any predetermined product concept. This is in both the actual service and the way it is delivered
  • maintain our expertise through ongoing professional development and attending international conferences.

We evaluate our performance in terms of outcomes rather than inputs - for example we:

  • focus project reporting on ensuring that we are consistently achieving the CLIENT’S objectives
  • gaining acceptance and buy-in from teams and managers with implementation responsibility
  • strive for minimal redo
  • use the test of “no surprises” for our clients.

Consistently applying our business principles is a core part of our learning and adapting environment - this will evolve and improve with our business development.

Commitment to delivering excellent service

We view successful consulting outcomes as those which create value and true advantage for our clients. For this reason, we carry out each assignment in a way that creates conditions essential to inducing action and effecting change. In other words, our work is results focused and not process bound.

Client outcomes

From our consulting assignments, our clients receive:

  • improved actual and perceived value-added service that can both be defined and measured
  • the opportunity to make break through changes rather than just changing at the edges
  • balanced advice that avoids the extremes of fashions and fads
  • on-going access to expertise and a sounding board to help with implementation.