Consultants in the dock again
So the Public Accounts Committee has found that of the £2bn + of public money being invested in the services of the consulting industry, around £500 million a year is being needlessly spent. If this is really the case, it seems staggering to me that consulting firms feel the full force of the resulting outcry. Surely if government mandarins squander 1/4 of all tax revenues entrusted to them, it is they that should be in the dock. If they'd spent this money jetting public sector workers around the world to watch every Formula 1 race in the calendar, it would be government rather than Formula 1 bosses in the dock.
Yet this is the peculiar way in which the media report on anything to do with the consulting industry. Conveniently overlooking the fact that these public sector contracts are not hugely lucrative (witness the low profit margins of public sector practices) and can be very risky (think back to the NHS NPfIT programme for an example of consulting firms getting burnt on public sector assignments). Instead we are greeted with headlines like the following and the blame is effortlessly shifted away from those who are truly culpable:
Anger as government pays £63 a second to consultants (The Scotsman)
Labour blows £2 billion-a-year on army of Whitehall advisers (Evening Standard)
Now of course there are examples of consulting projects that have failed to deliver - and a whole raft of reasons for such failures. But to suggest that the majority of this spend has yielded no return to the taxpayer is just farcical.
We are, it seems, doomed to a perception with the public that's just marginally above that of an estate agent or used car salesperson...
Tony Restell
Yet this is the peculiar way in which the media report on anything to do with the consulting industry. Conveniently overlooking the fact that these public sector contracts are not hugely lucrative (witness the low profit margins of public sector practices) and can be very risky (think back to the NHS NPfIT programme for an example of consulting firms getting burnt on public sector assignments). Instead we are greeted with headlines like the following and the blame is effortlessly shifted away from those who are truly culpable:
Anger as government pays £63 a second to consultants (The Scotsman)
Labour blows £2 billion-a-year on army of Whitehall advisers (Evening Standard)
Now of course there are examples of consulting projects that have failed to deliver - and a whole raft of reasons for such failures. But to suggest that the majority of this spend has yielded no return to the taxpayer is just farcical.
We are, it seems, doomed to a perception with the public that's just marginally above that of an estate agent or used car salesperson...
Tony Restell
posted by Tony Restell (Top-Consultant.com) @ 10:17 AM
6 Comments:
At 11:10 PM,
Anonymous said…
Well surely it is a dozen of one and half a dozen of the other? The government has used consultants partly to overcome their own inability to control the Civil Service to get it to do what Blair and Brown want, against the judgment and advice of experienced and mature Civil Servants? With external consultants the politicians have more control, in a direct fashion, and if consultants do not act as the politicians want they can easily fire them!
However, the problem seems to be that they do not and have not chosen particular consultants (or their consultancies) wisely, and often for the wrong reasons. As a result the advice and performance which they have received has not been particularly good, and certainly has not been world class.
This is all just another example of what has happened previously with the NHS and other particular programs, where consultants have been used, which have been discussed hereon before with similar conclusions and comments! Governments just never seem to learn - probably because it is not their money they are wasting, and they have in any case motives other than overt more often than not?
At 9:51 AM,
Anonymous said…
Why do we "Consultants" never blame ourselves. All consultants are supposedly intelligent enough to win projects, but it requires more intelligents to refuse work, until the Client is sure what they want, clearly defined and ensure that the right "type" of consultants are brought.
I have seen so many projects where the design phase merges with the implementation phase to the commissioning phase, and no one has the courage to stop/check the project to ensure it is still meeting the original intention. I am sure all consultants have a Conscience to do well. But we have to guide the Client to stop and take stock of the project and Clients should be trained to say NO!
At 9:45 PM,
Anonymous said…
So, the last Anonymous poster evidently agrees that the particular consultants chosen were to blame, if you are arguing that "we consultants never blame ourselves"?
However, you fail to consider whether the reason for that blame was because they were inherently good consultants or bad consultants who were chosen and used. If you do not accept that there are good and bad consultants then that implies that you are claiming that all consultants could be to blame for the failure of government projects just because they are consultants?
I think most of the good and competent consultants would vehemently disagree with that hypothosis.
In life generally some people are better at what they do than others. Some are totally incompetent at what they claim to be adept at and what they attempt to do. Management Consultancy is no different from anything else in that respect. If you select the dross you will get incompetency - that is exactly what the Peter Principle attempts to elaborate. If you choose monkeys to do any job you will get heartache and waste your money or someone else's - in this case the taxpayer's money!
At 2:14 PM,
Anonymous said…
I think one of the greatest problems is in the use of consultants whose contracts in value terms fall under the radar of most public sector procurement processes. I have recent experince of one government department where a "bunch of the bosses mates" (someone elses words, not mine) were milking the system for all it was worth. The use of such unqualified, unregulated so called consultants by ofetn very senior bosses is firstly giving poor value to the taxpayer and secondly giving professional consultants a bad name. Whilst it might seem that such use of "a bunch of the bosses mates" would not constitute a big problem, you would be shocked at how much this goes on and how much it does all add up to. What is most shocking though is is that these "mates" often haven't the first idea of what constitutes professional advice or ethics in the way they work and have even less idea of how to actually do the work they are suppossedly being asked to do - this has caused some frankly appalling decisions to be taken and huge costs to be incurred (their exorbitant fees aside). It is a grey area that urgently needs to be tightened up.
At 4:39 PM,
Anonymous said…
Exactly Anonymous 2.14 p.m. You have expressed it aptly, and have been rather less diplomatic! Many of the consultants used were chosen for the wrong reasons (the inescapable word is involving "corruption") and as a result were not and did not need to be competent.
Yet this was supposed to be the government that was going to rout out corruption and sleaze. We now can see that the reality is in fact that it is far worse than even Major's government was, and as you infer huge amounts of Public money have been wasted as a direct result!
At 11:31 PM,
Anonymous said…
As an owner/manager of a boutique management consulting firm in Washington DC - I can empathize with the sentiments - to an extent.
The US Govt (read: my tax dollars) spends Trillions (with a T) on consultants/contractors each year. I know for a fact that of the $7-$9 Billion IT budget for Homeland Security - over half of it goes to contractors. Same is true of the half trillion dollar Dept of Defense budget.
Although here in the US, consultants/contractors are so engrained with the government, no one is really shocked or appalled by the numbers.
Surely we need some of the negative attention!
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