I’m trying to understand how much of a stakeholder, readiness, or maturity assessment can be completed without a consultant present.

Thinking about your most recent project:

1. were participants interviewed live, asked to complete a questionnaire independently, or both?
2. what did the live interviews reveal that written responses would probably have missed?
3. have you used a self-completed assessment?
4. did it reduce interview time or simply add another step?
5. are there stakeholder groups or topics that you would never assess asynchronously?

I’m particularly interested in whether self-completed assessments can replace some interviews, or whether their realistic role is only to make subsequent interviews more focused.

Which consulting firms target UIUC as a school? Are there majors that are targets versus others or are they open to a broad set of majors from UIUC?

I’m trying to understand how consulting firms handle repeatable diagnostics, maturity assessments, and stakeholder interviews.

For those who run this kind of work:

• What do you use to collect participants' input?
• How much time typically goes into consolidating responses and drafting the client-ready report?
• Where is the real bottleneck: designing the questions, synthesizing the answers, internal review, or selling the assessment?
• Have you tried combining a survey tool with ChatGPT or Claude? If so, where did that workflow break down?
• How often do you repeat essentially the same assessment with different clients?

I'm especially interested in workflows involving multiple stakeholders and qualitative answers, rather than simple scored surveys.

I’m with Accenture S&C GN in the industrials team with 12 yoe, 34 fixed 9.5 variable.
Have following offer -
PwC india one consulting - customer consulting team - building material and auto as Manager. 44 lacs fixed 35% performance and 5 lacs JB

I have another offer from industry OEM-
AGM strategy & planning - 42.5 lacs fixed, 4.7 lacs variable and 4.3 lacs JB

I’m split whether to leave consulting and be back in industry (I came from industry and since I was fresh into consulting I was low balled in terms of designation).

Need suggestion on -

1. What to opt consulting or industry

2. What is the average yearly hike and performance pay % in PwC

3. Within manager what are the different levels, o was told that with the package offered it must be higher band of manager and promotion should be faster to next level.

4. In how many years I can expect promotion to SM

5. Any other perks for M grade

6. How is the travel requirement? Frequency?

7. Do managers have to manage multiple projects simultaneously?

Since I have to make a call very soon, any insights will help. Thanks

The most expensive mistake I made as a leader was promoting people who were genuinely ready for more responsibility.

Not people who were wrong for the job. People who were right for it, moved too early.

I have spent about twenty years building and leading teams, the last nine advising organizations somewhere between one million and thirty-five million in annual budget. Finished a doctorate a while back where the research was specifically on why leadership pipelines break down, so I have both the scar tissue and the data on this one.

Here is the pattern I keep running into and I am curious how it looks from inside an organization rather than from my side of it.

Every place I work with has a version of the high potential list. They identify the people with obvious capacity early, build some kind of accelerated path, and start moving them into stretch assignments quickly. The logic is sound on its face. This person is exceptional, we do not want to lose them, so we move fast.

What I have watched that produce, over and over, is that we take the most promising person in the building, put them on the fastest available track, and then act surprised when the thing that breaks them turns out to be the speed itself.

Potential is not readiness. Those are two different things and I think we have spent about thirty years treating them as one word.

Potential is what somebody starts with. Readiness is what happens to that raw material over time, under real pressure, inside an environment that actually does something to them. You cannot accelerate the second one by wanting it more.

And here is the part that took me longest to admit about my own decisions. The accelerated track is often a retention strategy wearing a development jacket. I was not moving people quickly because the speed was good for them. I was moving them quickly because I was afraid somebody else would, and the development language made that decision feel generous instead of self-interested.

When it fell apart, I described the person. He was not ready for that level. The role outgrew her. Good person, wrong seat. Every one of those sentences was me talking about somebody else when the accurate sentence would have been about a call I made.

The research surprised me on one point. Documentation does not fix this. One organization I studied had six defined levels of progression, a written pathway, training, signed covenants. Somebody built that with real care. And they were still filling roles by looking around the room on a Thursday afternoon and picking whoever seemed most capable that week.

So the gap is not between having a system and not having one. It is between having a system and using it when the pressure is on.

What I actually want to know from this group:

Has anyone here watched an organization deliberately slow someone down and have it work? Not a hiring freeze, not a budget thing. An intentional decision that a capable person needed more time before the next step.

I ask this a lot and the room usually goes quiet. Curious whether it is different here.

Bengaluru or Gurugram?

I’m a 30-year-old woman, MBA in Healthcare Management, currently working in healthcare IT in Bengaluru and joining Deloitte USI next month.

I’m confused whether to continue living in Bengaluru or move to Gurugram, which is closer to my hometown.

I’ve had a difficult time in Bengaluru, but I’m also familiar with the city, like the culture, and have a social circle here. Long term, I want to transition into healthcare/hospital consulting and also think about settling down.

Would you recommend staying in Bengaluru for a few years for career growth and then moving to NCR, or considering Gurugram now?

Looking for perspectives on career, quality of life, family proximity and settling down. What would you choose at 30?

With the ai era ongoing how’s the ongoing placement and job finding going.
The consulting jobs which the Insead is known for seems to be damping or it’s the myth.
How’s the outlook for the new jobs coming and the especially for the people coming from the tech and finance sectors.
FDE like roles seems to Rising are these impacting the jobs post mba ???

KPMG India/PHDCCI recently published a ~60-page report titled “Heritage Reimagined: Driving Immersive, Tech-Enabled and Experience-Led Tourism.”

It covers heritage tourism, Hyderabad, AI guides, digital twins, AR/VR, gamification and even quantum cryptography.

It looks polished. Big Four branding, LOTS OF FANCY GRAPHICS, lots of citations.

So I did something simple:

I opened the citations and checked them.

I’m not saying the entire report is fake. Several headline statistics do check out.

But I found enough problems with source interpretation, sample populations, technical claims, AI analysis and basic proofreading that I genuinely wonder what the final review process looked like.

Some examples

KPMG presents	What I found
65% of “Gen Z travellers” will pay a sustainability premium — Deloitte 2025	Matching Deloitte result appears to be 64%, from 2024, and about Gen Z consumers, not specifically travellers
“Millennials and Gen Z global food trends”	Several statistics inside the chart are actually reported by American Express for all global respondents
Cultural encounters/gastronomy described as trends among travellers	Underlying ATTA research surveys adventure travel tour operators, not travellers generally
India has 145 ticketed centrally protected monuments	Contemporary 2026 Government of India statements say 143
Telangana foreign tourism: ~60k → ~150k, presented as growth	Official series is roughly 68,401 → 160,912 → 155,313. So 2024 actually declined from 2023
Digital twins were “initially developed for monitoring nuclear plants”	The cited source does not establish that history; the modern Digital Twin concept is generally traced to Michael Grieves / PLM work around 2002

The most revealing issue: changing the population

KPMG says:

“65% of Gen Z travellers are willing to pay a premium for environmentally sustainable products and services.”

But the matching Deloitte finding appears to be:

64%
from 2024, not 2025,
and referring to Gen Z consumers, not specifically travellers.

So we effectively get:

2024 → 2025
64% → 65%
consumers → travellers

The 1% difference isn't important.

Changing the population being measured is.

A consumer-attitude statistic does not automatically become evidence about tourism behaviour.

The American Express charts have a similar problem

KPMG has a chart titled:

“Millennials and Gen Z global food trends.”

It includes percentages such as 69% preferring street-food vendors, 53% exploring bakeries and 50% using grocery stores.

But American Express distinguishes between:

“global respondents”

and

“Millennials and Gen Z surveyed.”

Several percentages KPMG places under the Millennial/Gen-Z heading appear to actually describe the full global sample.

Again:

The number may be real.

The denominator isn't the one the chart implies.

Telangana is a good example of selective framing

KPMG presents foreign tourism as:

~60,000 in 2022 → ~150,000 in 2024

under a section about “growth and momentum.”

But the official sequence is approximately:

2022: 68,401
2023: 160,912
2024: 155,313

So yes, there was huge growth versus 2022.

But there was also a decline in 2024 versus 2023.

Leave out the middle year and the narrative looks much cleaner.

The AI section also deserves scrutiny

KPMG is very enthusiastic about:

AI heritage guides, AI storytelling, LLMs, personalised itineraries, generative imagery and autonomous AI travel agents.

But this is cultural heritage.

Where is the equally detailed discussion about AI inventing:

• historical events,
• dates,
• genealogies,
• translations,
• religious interpretations,
• cultural practices,
• or synthetic reconstructions?

Where are the controls around:

authoritative sources, curator approval, citations, provenance, uncertainty indicators, community consent and human review?

The report spends far more time explaining how AI can make heritage “immersive” than explaining how institutions prevent AI from manufacturing history.

Interestingly, KPMG also discloses on the final page:

“Some images in this report have been created using artificial intelligence technology.”

Good that they disclosed it.

But the report doesn't identify which images, which tools/models were used or provide image-level provenance.

For a report built around the ideas of heritage and authenticity, that's worth noting.

Then there are the spelling, grammar and QA errors

These don't prove the analysis is wrong.

But in a professionally produced KPMG report — especially one that lists a Research Team, Compliance Team and KPMG Design — the volume of obvious errors is surprising.

Examples directly from the report include:

“Adventure Travel Tarde Association”
instead of Trade Association

“Actvity Popularity Rank”
instead of Activity

“heritage securtiy”
instead of security

“Through thoughtfully interventions”

“Combing asset and experiences”
apparently meant to be Combining assets and experiences

“ways that aligns”

“travellers increasing value experiences”

“multimedia light and sound show at Golconda fort show”

There is also a Hyderabad digital-twin sentence saying the model is:

“comprising data points”

with the actual number missing — even though elsewhere in the same report KPMG gives the figure as 10.7 billion data points.

And one chart is titled:

“Foreign Tourist Arrivals to India 2019–2025”

while the chart itself stops at 2024.

One typo means nothing.

But when you combine repeated proofreading failures with source-population errors and questionable citations, it raises a fair question:

How rigorous was the final review?

The bigger problem

The report repeatedly seems to follow this logic:

Technology exists
↓
It could be used in heritage tourism
↓
Therefore engagement improves
↓
Therefore spending / dwell time / competitiveness improves

But those arrows require evidence.

A $300bn global gamification market doesn't prove gamification works at Indian monuments.

An AI itinerary generator doesn't prove visitor satisfaction improves.

A digital twin existing doesn't prove more tourists visit.

A survey of 360 Chinese heritage tourists doesn't automatically predict visitor behaviour in Hyderabad.

Evidence that a technology exists is not the same as evidence that it produces the claimed tourism outcome.

To be fair to KPMG

Several important statistics I checked do hold up.

India's ~2.948bn domestic tourist visits, ~9.95m foreign tourist arrivals, several Telangana project values and some of the headline market estimates are broadly supported.

So the correct criticism is not:

“KPMG fabricated everything.”

It is more subtle:

>

And once a polished KPMG infographic gets repeated elsewhere, people stop checking Deloitte, American Express or the government source.

That is how an interpretation error can eventually become an accepted “industry fact.”

My takeaway:

Don't assume a statistic is reliable just because the logo on the PDF is prestigious. Open the footnotes.

If I've interpreted any of the original sources incorrectly, post the source and I'll happily correct the post.

KPMG should be held to the same standard.

I am 4 years into my current job and I am due for promotion in few months and currently staffed on a long term project.
I need haven’t taken a lot of vacations in the last 4 years. I barely used up 10-12 leaves a year. I have many leaves which would not be carried forward if i do not use them about 20-25 leaves. I have planned vacations 3-4months down the lane.
My manager says i cannot take these many leaves.
I feel its unfair as these are my earned leaves and all i need to do is give enough notice. I have given almost 6months notice.
I am in 2 minds because this might affect my promotion (may be). I feel my boundaries are being pushed constantly.