Publications
Publications
- February 2009 (Revised February 2012)
- HBS Case Collection
Exeter Group, Inc. (A)
By: Robert G. Eccles, Das Narayandas and Kerry Herman
Abstract
Jonathan Kutchins and Mark Cullen, managing partners of IT consulting firm Exeter Group, Inc., are considering four potential client engagements. Three of them involve prominent universities, an area of market strength for the firm, and one involves a top-tier strategy consulting firm, a new market for Exeter. Each of the projects has both attractive and unattractive attributes, with various degrees of upside and downside risk. As a relatively new and small IT consulting firm, Exeter needs to make careful choices about how it allocates resources to projects, and it is not clear if the firm has the capacity to add all four projects at once. Thus Kutchins and Cullen have to decide which, if any, of these projects to do. In some cases they must also decide whether they want to try to restructure the nature of the engagement to better fit the firm's service model. Although young and small, the firm has grown successfully and is optimistic about its future prospects. Kutchins and Cullen thus want to make decisions about these very specific client engagements in the context of their overall strategy and the contributions of these engagements in helping the firm achieve its long-term goals.
Keywords
Decision Choices and Conditions; Resource Allocation; Market Entry and Exit; Service Operations; Performance Capacity; Business Strategy; Information Technology; Consulting Industry
Citation
Eccles, Robert G., Das Narayandas, and Kerry Herman. "Exeter Group, Inc. (A)." Harvard Business School Case 409-001, February 2009. (Revised February 2012.)