| 6-Jan-2005 |
How much longer do consultants have to keep justifying their very existence? |
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Our specialist management consultancy columnist Mick James examines why it is that management consultants get such a bad press and proposes a way you can help improve public perceptions of our profession. He also challenges the view that government remains a gullible purchaser of consulting services - a charge that few in our industry would accept. ***************
How much longer do consultants have to keep justifying their very existence? The Independent recently devoted a double–page spread to a rant about consultants headed: “They give us solutions we may not need, systems that may not work, at a price we shouldn't pay, in a language we don't understand.” A familiar, not to say hackneyed complaint that could have appeared almost anywhere in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but shouldn’t we expect more of a national newspaper in 2005?
What astonished me about this piece was its sheer crudity. The author, who claims to have been a management consultant, breathlessly informed readers that consultants who earn less than £1,000 a week can be charged out to clients at £7,000 a week: “few clients ever do the simple mathematics and ask why they should pay more than £300,000 a year for a junior adviser who is probably getting paid only around a tenth of that”. It’s probably because few clients are naïve enough to imagine that consultants work 365 days a year and live in a land free of overheads. Yet still this nonsense is trotted out.
To give him his due, the author later acknowledges that there is such a thing as utilization rate, but that too is apparently scandal: “executives' bonuses depend on their reaching certain "utilisation" targets... this means that 70 per cent of their time must be sold to clients, whether clients have problems to be solved or not.”
The public sector has long been a stick to beat consultants with, particularly if, as the press is wont to do, you fail to make any distinction between IT and consultancy projects.
“Mandarins” are apparently “easily baffled by computer companies ... with high-pressure salesmanship and lobbying.” Would these mandarins include the likes of ex-Accenture MD Ian Watmore, now head of e-government? Would Patricia Hewitt, secretary of state at the DTI and a former head of research at Andersen Consulting count as one of the “easily baffled”?
Lest you think this is just an aberration by the Indy, The Times recently ran a story claiming that the use of consultants in the public sector was a “false economy”. Deriding the public sector’s “mania for outsourcing” the piece accused central government of “splurging more than £1 million in 2004”. I think they meant a billion, but what’s a factor of 1,000 when you’re attacking consultants?
The piece quoted the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) as saying that consultants “often replace or duplicate work that existing staff could do” and were “used because departments had got rid of management staff as part of an exercise to reduce Whitehall costs”. As someone who will probably have to work until he’s 80 to fund public sector pension commitments I can only applaud this trend, but I’m appalled by the inability of a national newspaper to even consider the possibility that some of this consultancy spend might represent value-for-money. I’m reminded of the Conservatives’ manifesto pledge to not only slash £35bn from public spending but to do so while also cutting consultancy expenditure by a third. I also note that cost overruns in the public sector attract condemnation irrespective of whether or not the financial risk is borne by the government or, as is increasingly the case, its contractors.
In this country it seems we have an appetite for change but a distaste for change agents. In any other area of professional life, an industry with the growth record of consultancy would be feted. In the UK every announcement of increased figures by the Management Consultancies Association is treated as a cue for national mourning.
I was once asked, at very short notice, to give a speech to a consultancy gathering on the topic of “why I hate consultants”. I was replaced at even shorter notice by a more glamorous journalist who apparently trotted out all the usual clichés about borrowing your watch to tell you the time. I would have said the thing I hate most about consultants is the way that they make bad managers look good. When I work with consultancies to develop case studies, the most difficult thing is trying to couch the project so that the client looks good as well. All too often the project is called off because the client simply doesn’t want the world to know that the turnaround in their business came with outside help.
So I’d like your help in changing this picture. I’d like to compile a list of the top dozen or so features of modern life that would simply never have happened without the consultancy industry. Things like the successful implementation of the London Congestion Charge, a project almost universally predicted to be too complex to work. I don’t want to focus on individual projects as such, but just be able to complete a few sentences along the lines of “If it weren’t for consultants you wouldn’t be able to...” I’ll respect all confidences, and even put in some of the legwork in rooting out these stories if you point me in the right direction. Just drop me a mail on the address below...
Related link: Management Consultancy profession to gather at annual conference
All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com
Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at:
mick.james@top-consultant.com |
