The consulting paradox
"Consultants, it seems, are everywhere: management consultants, tax consultants, security consultants, technology consultants, health consultants, personnel consultants, transport consultants. Even consultants have consultants. Blimey! What's happened to British management? When did it stop taking decisions and start dialling up a help-line? How did companies ever cope without them?” (Daily Telegraph, May 2006)
Why is it that every survey of clients shows high levels of satisfaction with the work consultants do for them, yet the public reputation of consultants seems so low? A recent MCA survey may provide some of the answer.
Responding to the questionnaire, 86 percent of respondents said they were either partially or completely satisfied with the service they received from consultants. However, we also asked people to tell us what role they’d played in the project – and, to my knowledge, this is the first piece of research to have done that. People were asked to classify themselves as decision-makers, influencers, project managers, people who had been seconded into the project to work with the consulting team or “end-users” – people affected by the consulting project in some way but not directly involved in it.
Looking at satisfaction levels from this point of view revealed that those who decide to use consultants are much more likely – in fact, four times as likely – to be satisfied as people who were seconded from elsewhere in the client organisation to work on a project.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, decision-makers tend to view consulting projects in a positive light because that validates their decision to use consultants; it may also be that they are in a better position to see the overall benefits. Perhaps people seconded into projects from elsewhere in a client organisation and end-users feel put-upon; maybe they resent the consultants’ presence. Perhaps this dichotomy is inevitable.
Every manager has their own view on how you best manage consultants. Most will tell you it is a combination of credibility on the part of the consultants, clarity of objectives, and good communication. These aspects are undoubtedly important but the fact they are all come from the top down may be the reason why so many people caught up in consulting projects are so negative about their experience. Improving the way in which junior and middle-ranking staff work with consultants is just as important to success.
The MCA’s research showed clearly that it is the lateral relationships between the consultants and members of a client’s staff involved in the project which are vital in determining success. This is a factor people loosely term “collaboration” or “working in partnership.” 81 percent of satisfied people believed their work with consultants represented genuine partnership working, compared to just 2 percent of dissatisfied ones. Among consulting projects that have gone well, it is hard to find a single one that has not involved a joint client-consultant team. Moreover, integration is not just a question of people working together or being based in the same physical location: 66 percent of satisfied clients thought team work had been so effective that it was hard to tell whether someone was an employee or a consultant; 72 percent of dissatisfied clients disagreed.
Joint working and not imposing a rigid methodology are both important to people who work side by side with consultants, but the single most important factor in making the relationship work at this very personal level is the extent to which the people involved from the client side gain something from the experience. After all, why should they put up with the disruption of having consultants in if they don’t benefit? 70 percent of respondents who were satisfied with the work the consultants had done had also gained personally from the experience, compared with just 6 percent of those who were dissatisfied. This remains true, irrespective of the size of the project, the role of the person responding and the length of time the consultants were around.
That no one gets out of bed on a Monday morning to improve their employer’s share-price is a truism of modern management, so why should we expect the people involved in consulting projects to think any differently?
This is an edited extract of an article by Fiona Czerniawska which first appeared in Capgemini’s Consulting Review.
