| | Recently I attended the
launch event of the new
National Occupational
Standards for Management
and Business
Consultancy. These have
been developed by the
Management Standards
Centre (MSC) in
conjunction with
consultancy bodies such
as the MCA and IBC, as
well as client bodies
and other stakeholders.
The result is an
impressively
comprehensive list of 13
standards any consultant
should be expected to
reach in areas ranging
from supporting clients
to developing
professional networks.
But is it needed?
One of the lead
consultants of the MSC,
Trevor Boutall, who
helped develop the
standards, had a single
question for consultants
in the audience: “Did
you all have a rigorous
induction into
consultancy?” It was
answered more by the
ripple of laughter than
the show of hands.
“We’ve developed a
little guide based on
the standards,” he said.
“You can use that to
benchmark your current
performance and see if
there are areas where
you can be more
effective.”
While this would, of
course, be a
confidential exercise,
he pointed out that
clients would
increasingly be using
the standards
themselves.
So how much room for
improvement is there? I
know there were some
there who bridled at the
evening’s subtitle
“Making UK Management &
Business Consultancy
World Class by 2020” and
I was one of them. If
consultancy isn’t “world
class” in the UK, where
is it? Iceland? And if
it’s not, do we really
have to wait until 2020?
However, that doesn’t
mean there is cause for
complacency, and the
rest of the evening was
taken up by speakers who
made some constructive
criticisms of the
industry that could be
addressed through
reference to the
National Occupational
Standards (NOS)
standards. It was an
object lesson in the
sort of informed debate
we could be having about
consultancy if the | |
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| | mainstream press wrote
about the real industry
rather than a clichéd
figment of its
imagination.
Dr Joe O’Mahoney
outlined some of the
challenges facing the
industry, particularly
in attracting talent,
and noted that the
evidence was that
consultancy was becoming
less innovative at a
time when innovation is
precisely what clients
want. Dr O’Mahoney is at
the start of an exciting
– and impressively
well-funded – project to
investigate this
phenomenon, and I hope
to be speaking in more
detail with him about
this soon.
But the sharpest
barbs came from David
Singleton, chairman of
Alexander Consulting,
who outlined an
impressive list of
reasons why consultants
think they are so
valuable to clients –
then pointed out that
the reality often failed
to live up to the
vision.
“We say we do all
these things, but we
don’t,” he said.
“Clients need us to be
what we say we are.”
This includes taking
responsibility for
whether or not clients
actually implement a
project, he said.
“Do we see a change?”
he asked. “Any other
output than a measurable
change has immeasurable
consequences.”
Consultants should
use the NOS as a
framework against which
to measure themselves
and ensure that the
standards embodied in
them become daily
practice.
Finishing up the
evening was Paul Vincent
of Insight Sourcing,
whom I interviewed
recently about his
efforts to develop a way
in which procurement can
avoid being the “nasty
cop” in the
consultant-client
relationship and
actually add value. His
model certainly seems to
be the way forward, but
when I spoke to him I
was surprised to find
that most of his work
was with consultants. It
seems that consultants
are far more interested
in seeing things through
the eyes of the buyer
than buyers are in | |
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| | finding out how they can
purchase consultancy
more effectively.
For me that summed up
my one qualm about the
launch. Clearly,
consultants are under a
commercial imperative to
understand their
clients, and owe a duty
of care to them. But
what are the
consequences for both
sides? If a consultant
fails to make a sale
they move on to the next
prospect. For clients
the consequences of
failure to buy the right
consultancy or implement
the right project can
be, as Singleton pointed
out, “immeasurable.” The
relative lack of
interest is to me,
inexcusable.
Perhaps the next task
for a standards-setting
body should be the
development of a
similarly explicit and
comprehensive set of
standards for
consultancy clients. In
the meantime, an
emergency bulletin
should go out, “don’t
let just anybody do it”.
It’s true that clients
overall have grown much
more sophisticated as a
group, and there are
some expert purchasers
out there – often
ex-consultants. But
there are plenty of
amateurs out there too.
Consultants are
over-prone to take all
this weight on their
shoulders, but it’s not
a sustainable position.
We wouldn’t consider
someone to be able as a
manager if they couldn’t
appraise staff or manage
a budget. Shouldn’t the
effective sourcing and
deployment of outside
resources be an equally
valued competence? In
the popular prints the
resort to outside
advisers is seen as a
mark of weakness, but
companies who know when
and, above all, how to
use consultants, are at
a considerable advantage
over the competition.
Of course it would be
a brave consultant
indeed who openly
questioned his client’s
competence. So the
intervention of an
independent-standard
setting body could be
the missing piece of the
jigsaw, the key that
unlocks not just
world-class consultancy
but world-class
outcomes. | |
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