Corporate scandals involving major consulting organisations and their blue chip clients, both in the US and in Australia, have raised serious questions about the role and accountability of consultants. It has highlighted serious weaknesses with the way external consultants operate, in the quality of the service and advice provided to clients and the potential conflict of interest between doing the job properly and retaining the client and the associated revenue stream.
In the light of these scandals, it is timely for companies using external consultants to review how and why they are deployed within their business and the way their services are measured and managed. There is a need for a paradigm shift in both the way external consultants operate and in the degree of involvement of the client organisation, for companies to achieve maximum business benefit from their employment.
A new "symbiotic" way of working that demands more commitment and accountability from both parties is required.
External consultants used by most organisations fit into two main categories: expert consultants and contract resources. Expert consultants are typically brought into the client organisation at a high level to provide strategic advice on critical business issues or problems.
At best, the employment of these consultants is recognition that external input can be valuable. It is also a tacit acknowledgement that the organisation does not have the internal skills to address the issue or lacks confidence in the people with the appropriate skills.
At worst, experts are brought in as a "quick-fix" solution or as a way for senior management to hedge their bets on risky business issues -if all goes well, they can take the credit, if it goes poorly, there is always someone external to take the blame! Typically, a team of experts descend on an organisation for months, reviewing relevant aspects of the business, and working through their own methodology. Aside from the few staff that may be seconded to the consultant's team, employee involvement in this process is either non-existent or limited to interrogation about their department, role and customers. As such, skills or knowledge transfer from the consulting team to the organisation is not in the best interests of the consultants, who after all are being paid for their unique expertise.
The deliverable from this type of consulting project is usually an impressive report, full of recommendations that comes at a cost of least several hundred thousand dollars.
Typically, however, the consultant has no involvement in or responsibility for the successful implementation of its recommendations. This is left to the organisation and is often where things go wrong. In some cases, the completion of the report is viewed by the client as the completion of the project or the resolution of the issue and nothing further gets done. Alternatively, in-house politics can effectively prevent implementation of any high risk, high cost or highly political recommendations.
If the recommendations require large-scale cultural change, the project may fail as management is not willing to invest, committed to undertaking, nor equipped to manage cultural transformation. Staff fearful about the impact of recommendations on their jobs, or highly cynical about the practicalities of implementing the recommendations can work hard to subvert those recommendations actually selected for implementation.
At the other end of the scale, contact resourcing is where an organisation buys skilled bodies from an agency to deploy on projects which typically require significant effort for a limited duration, and. where it does not have enough skilled permanent employees to handle the work. The organisation usually has a transaction-based relationship with the source of the contract labour, where it pays per day for the resources provided. There is rarely any incentive for early completion of the project -the longer the resource is deployed, the more money the agency makes. Skills transfer from contracted staff is limited to osmosis i.e. whatever permanent employee's pick-up from the contractor while they are there.
The key failure of both of these consulting models is that they are not directly linked to the achievement of real business results. To achieve the desired business outcome requires not only greater commitment and accountability from consultant, but also from the client
The Serious Consulting Model
