Field note / consultancies
Routine IT work is billable time you are not billing for.
A consultancy sells judgment. Every hour a senior consultant spends resetting a password or chasing a Microsoft 365 licence is an hour not spent on the advisory work the client actually pays for - and often was not asked to pay for the IT work either.
Where consultancies lose time
Four request types that rarely need a senior consultant.
| Request type | Why it does not need advisory judgment |
|---|---|
| New starter or contractor access setup | A repeatable pattern once roles and entitlements are documented. |
| Routine Microsoft 365 administration | Delegated, scoped tenant tasks inside an agreed role pattern. |
| Endpoint issues on a known device fleet | Standard troubleshooting once devices are enrolled and visible. |
| Recurring vendor or licence renewals | Administrative follow-through, not strategic advice. |
Decision test
Three signals this fits a consultancy specifically.
- Senior staff can name the IT tasks currently eating billable hours.
- The client base is concentrated enough that a mishandled handoff would be noticed and costly.
- The firm can describe, in one sentence, where advisory work ends and IT execution begins.
A consultancy without a concentrated, trusted client base gains less from discretion than the effort to set it up costs - see the poor-fit patterns before committing.
Protecting the advisory brand
A botched IT handoff reflects on the consultant's judgment, not just the delivery team.
Clients who hired a consultancy for its judgment will read any IT stumble as a judgment failure, even when the work was fulfilled behind the scenes. This is exactly why identity rules and a clean escalation path matter more here than in a lower-trust relationship - the consultancy's entire value proposition is credibility.
Bring the tasks eating billable time - not client records.
A short list of recurring, non-advisory requests is enough to test whether a delivery lane fits your practice.