Management consulting refers to both the industry, and the practice of, helping organizations improve their performance, primarily through the thorough analysis of existing business problems and development of plans for improvement. Organizations hire the services of management consultants for a number of reasons, including, for example, to gain external, and presumably more objective advice and recommendations, to gain access the consultants' specialized expertise, or simply as temporary help during a one-time project, where the hiring of permanent employees is not required. Because of their exposure to and relationships with numerous organizations, consultancies are also said to be aware of industry 'best practices,' although the transferability of such practices from one organization to another is the subject of debate. Consultancies may also provide organizational change management assistance, development of coaching skills, technology implementation, strategy development, or operational improvement services. Management consultants generally bring their own, proprietary methodologies or frameworks to guide the identification of problems, and to serve as the basis for recommendations for more effective or efficient ways of performing business tasks.

Management consulting refers generally to the provision of business consulting services, but there are numerous specializations, such as Information technology consulting,human resource consulting, and others, many of which overlap, and most of which are offered by the large diversified consultancies listed below. So-called 'boutique' consultancies, however, are smaller organizations specializing in one or a few of such specializations.

Management Consulting is becoming more prevalent in non-business related fields as well. As the need for professional and specialized advice grows, other industries such as government, quasi-government and not-for-profit agencies are turning to the same managerial principles that have helped the private sector for years.

One important and recent change in the industry has been the spin-off or separation of the consulting and the accounting units of the large diversified firms. For these firms, which began business as accounting firms, management consulting was a new extension to their business. But precipitated by a number of highly publicized scandals over accounting practices, such as the Enron scandal, accountancies began divestiture of their management consulting units, to more easily comply with tighter regulatory scrutiny that arose in the wake of the scandals.

Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources (e.g. people) in such a way that the project is completed within defined scope, quality, time and cost constraints. A project is a temporary and one-time endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service, which brings about beneficial change or added value. This property of being a temporary and one-time undertaking contrasts with processes, or operations, which are permanent or semi-permanent ongoing functional work to create the same product or service over and over again. The management of these two systems is often very different and requires varying technical skills and philosophy, hence requiring the development of project managements.

The first challenge of project management is to make sure that a project is delivered within defined constraints. The second, more ambitious challenge is the optimized allocation and integration of inputs needed to meet pre-defined objectives. A project is a carefully defined set of activities that use resources (money, people, materials, energy, space, provisions, communication, etc.) to meet the pre-defined objectives.

Product Support Services, more commonly referred to as PSS, is the Microsoft business unit with primary responsibility for responding to end-user and partner requests for assistance with the company's products and services.

PSS also gives feedback to Microsoft development groups for use in the development of future products or product features. The Windows 2000 recovery console, for instance, was developed in large part to address difficulty that PSS agents had when attempting to assist customers with non-functional Windows NT installations. Additionally, PSS identifies major issues with products, and works with the responsible product teams in order to create "hotfixes" for these issues, and/or make sure that the issues are addressed in service packs or future product versions.

PSS offers a wide variety of support options, with varying prices. Options include assistance with:

• Basic usage
• "Break-fix" support
• Security patch installation
• Onsite and offsite consulting

Business process automation, or BPA, is the process a business uses to contain costs. It consists of integrating applications, cutting labor wherever possible, and using software applications throughout the organization.

Business Intelligence (BI):

• Analytics
• Reporting
• Business Portals

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is an implementation of Microsoft's Visual Basic, an event driven programming language and associated integrated development environment (IDE) which is built into most Microsoft Office applications. It is also built in to Office applications for Apple Mac OS, other Microsoft applications such as Microsoft MapPoint and Microsoft Visio — a former independent application which was acquired by Microsoft — as well as being at least partially implemented in some other applications such as AutoCAD, WordPerfect and ESRI ArcGIS. It supersedes and expands on the capabilities of earlier application-specific macro programming languages such as Word's WordBasic, and can be used to control almost all aspects of the host application, including manipulating user interface features, such as menus and toolbars, and working with custom user forms or dialog boxes. VBA can also be used to create import and export filters for various file formats, such as ODF.

VBA itself is an interpreted language. As its name suggests, VBA is closely related to Visual Basic, but can normally only run code from within a host application rather than as a standalone application. It can, however, be used to control one application from another using OLE Automation. For example, it is used to automatically create a Word report from Excel data, in turn automatically collected by Excel from polled observation sensors.

VBA is functionally rich and extremely flexible but it does have some important limitations, including limited support for function pointers which are used as callback functions in the Windows API. It has the ability to use (but not create) (ActiveX/CO M) DLLs, and later versions add support for class modules.