Are consultants stealing tax payers' watches?

There is a well known and very old joke about consultants, indeed it is probably on a wall in Latin somewhere! You know the one: management consultants steal your watch, tell you the time and then keep the watch. It would be funny if it wasn’t so true! And it would be even funnier if public service organisations did not waste so much money keeping it true and wasting millions of tax payer pounds as a result. 

Take this for example which I have extracted (and anonymised) from a tender published this morning: “We are therefore seeking to appoint consultants with the appropriate experience and expertise to develop a detailed action plan to...etc.” The client wants a team of consultants to use the clients existing “desire to take performance to the next level and establish xxx as a leader in this field on a national if not international level”. The tender helpfully outlines all the partners and projects that would need to be reviewed and mined for their information & ideas so that the external consultants can create the action plan wanted. The tender helpfully even goes on to suggest some of the main themes for improvement action indicating that a good amount of analysis and development work has already been done. 

This type of tender is frighteningly common. I could just as easily have quoted from another one I saw two days ago seeking help from external consultants to come and write the future of their district for them. And there are countless others I have seen in the past: tenders seeking external consultants to deliver an expensive report based ‘fix’ to them. 

But why are these consultancy assignments like these such a huge waste of money? Here are my reasons:

1. A small external consultancy team is most unlikely to be able to grasp the full complexity of the issues in question. They will only ever be seeing a few frames in somebody else’s long running movie.
2. The very nature of the work to generate a consultant-owned report and set of recommendations to be delivered to the organisation is unlikely to nurture the degree of commitment inside the client organisation (and wider system) required to see the plans through to results
3. The process used by most consultants involves talking to a number of stakeholders in a more or less linear fashion, often more than once. This approach does not generate the inter linking of all the stakeholders involved and is much less likely to generate a creative solution to requirements in question.
4. Moreover because the connectivity of the stakeholders is not fully harnessed (because each one only gets to talk with the consultant team rather than with each other) the resulting plans are likely to be less sustainable. An approach which seeks to develop a connected ‘strategic community of stakeholders’ is much more likely to achieve long term as well as short term goals in my view.
5. By bringing in an external consultant to carry out an ‘expert led’ project ‘to’ (rather than with) the client’s system, the client is in severe danger of giving out the message to its own staff of “we don’t think you are competent or trustworthy enough to the job required”. I have never met a client where this was their intention, but I have met many staff who thought it was. There is a long term cost to this.
6. By not embarking on a more participative and ‘whole system’ approach, the client is missing out on so many of the insights, energy and knowledge already held within the staff and stakeholders. Tapping into this for the sake of meeting the current requirements as well as nurturing a culture of engagement in the future provides so many more benefits than a sterile external consultants’ report can provide.
7. Finally, the costs of bringing an external consultant team up to speed, and then paying for them to talk with lots of people and analyse existing documents are huge. It is far cheaper and more effective, instead, to get the key people who would need to be involved (including those who wrote the existing reports) all together in a room for a day or two to have some good conversations. The resulting energy, creativity, and shared understanding of the complex detail & ‘big picture’ views of what needs to be done is far more valuable than any external consultants’ report.

And so I would ask you, if you are a client who is planning to hire in a team of consultants to write a report for you: could far more be achieved instead by bringing the key people together in room for a day or two? Yes, you may still value having an external facilitator to help you think through the design of such an event and ‘hold the ring’ for you on the day itself. If the event is designed well, it will also write its own report.

What do you think?

Could this be better value for money?

Original blogpost: http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/

Thanks!

Just a quick thank you to Tom Reynolds and all who were involved in organising and facilitating yesterday's Leadership Development Community of Practice Focus Group at Layden House. It was very good afternoon for learning and networking - and hopefully offering some ideas about the development of this COP. 

The discussion around evaluation of leadership development and how to weave that into the commissioning process was useful and could well have gone on for quite a while longer!

It was also refreshing to have the space for providers, commissioners and supporters to meet without the shackles of procurement getting in the way! Equally more time for this would have been useful!

I found these two links on evaluation that might interest some:

http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/14067/01/Leadership_Evaluation_report.pdf 

"This report evaluates a Leadership Development programme delivered by the Wessex Courses Centre (WCC) and commissioned by the Hampshire and Isle of White Workforce Development Confederation (WDC). As part of the ongoing commitment to incorporate evidence into practice, the WDC commissioned an independent evaluation as part of this development course. This evaluation wasundertaken collaboratively by the Health Care Innovation Unit (HCIU) and the School of Management at the University of Southampton."

http://www.wkkf.org/~/media/10BF675E6D0C4340AE8B038F5080CBFC.ashx

 

"This handbook is guided by the belief that evaluation should be supportive and responsive to projects, rather than become an end in itself. It provides a framework for thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool. It is written primarily for project directors who have direct responsibility for the ongoing evaluation of W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded projects. However, our hope is that project directors will use this handbook as a resource for other project staff who have evaluation responsibilities, for external evaluators, and for board members" 

 

Apart from the fact that I always thought it was the Isle of Wight... these two documents look interesting.

 Thanks again and good to meet everyone yesterday!

Jon

This handbook is guided by the belief that evaluation should be supportive and

 

responsive to projects, rather than become an end in itself. It provides a framework

for thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool. It is written

primarily for project directors who have direct responsibility for the ongoing

evaluation of W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded projects. However, our hope is that

project directors will use this handbook as a resource for other project staff who have

evaluation responsibilities, for external evaluators, and for board membersThis handbook is guided by the belief that evaluation should be supportive andresponsive to projects, rather than become an end in itself. It provides a frameworkfor thinking about evaluation as a relevant and useful program tool. It is writtenprimarily for project directors who have direct responsibility for the ongoingevaluation of W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded projects. However, our hope is thatproject directors will use this handbook as a resource for other project staff who haveevaluation responsibilities, for external evaluators, and for board members"

 

 

 

Disruptive technology... or maybe disruptive questions?

I met an old friend for lunch yesterday and we got to talking about 'disruptive technologies' - the kinds of new gizmos and systems that really change the way we live our lives. I remember Charles Handy talking about this in his book 'The Age of Unreason' - although he did not call them disruptive technologies then. One of his ideas was how the invention of the chimney meant that you could have a house with more rooms - and so began the fragmentation of family life.

Of course when we think of disruptive technologies we are now more likely to think of the internet, MP3 players or indeed how my car ESP system helped me manage a skid on snow the other day without ending up in a ditch.

But I got to thinking about what might be disruptive questions? The sorts of questions that if asked of a way of working - might just change we the way we look at a service and encourage people to do things things differently - in a leaner way perhaps.

Over the years, I have been collecting a set of questions which I often present to people to help them redesign a process or a service. I say that they come with a guarantee: if you ask them seriously of any process or service and don't find at least one (or indeed two or three) ways of improving the service, I will eat my hat!

So here are the questions - which I offer as a means to help people reflect on their ways of working and come up with new ways of doing it (in no particular order):

 

• Have we agreed the stakeholder requirements?
• Are the providers involved adequately trained?
• Are there too many ‘handovers’?
• Is the process being done in the right order?
• Could it be made simpler with a ‘triage’ stage?
• Could we make better use of technology?
• Where are the sources of rework?
• Could some parts of the process be done at the same time?
• Could we get the users / clients / etc. to do more?
• Are there too many checks and controls?
• Could we get our partners or suppliers to take action?
• Could we create an expert system to make it work better?
• Is there a ‘standard’ way of carrying out the process?
• Could different people or agencies be providing the service (or part of it)?
• Have we made any cultural or professional assumptions that are getting in the way?
• Are the performance measures helping?
• Could we stop providing the service altogether?
• Are decision making protocols getting in the way?
• Does the process contribute to outcome goals?

I hope this proves useful to people. Please blog here with any results that you come up with.

One of my favourites was from a local authority that looked into its street light repairing process. They quickly realised that when they sent out an engineer to see if the street light was in fact not working (as had been reported by a member of the public) they were in fact assuming that the public probably lied. When they changed this assumption to 'the public are probably telling us the truth' - they saved themselves huge amount of resources by sending out the fixing engineer first.

Jon

http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/