| | Early last year we
picked Serco Consulting
as “one to watch”, as
the services giant
formed the nucleus of a
new consulting
capability out if its
own government
consultancy and recent
acquisition French
Thornton. How has the
new entity fared after
its first year?
I spoke to managing
director Peter Illsley,
who confirmed that, like
so many of the newer
names in consultancy,
Serco Consulting has
benefited from
consultants revising
their career options in
the light of changes in
the industry.
“I’ve interviewed
loads of people who were
fed up with working in
large organisations,
where all they were
doing was writing bids
or doing clean up work,”
he says. “They often end
up getting dragged into
internal projects, and
for a lot of people that
doesn’t work. Seen from
a distance it appears
that there’s something
not happening in those
relationships.”
Not that he puts
himself in that
category. Illsley comes
to Serco after a career
that’s spanned NHS
management, community
care, the Audit | |
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| | with the advice. The
trouble with a lot of
firms is that’s not what
they try to do — it’s
not advice based on
services, they try
instead to be the front
end of sales. Serco has
never asked us to do
that: it wants us to
provide a great
consultancy service, for
Serco to be as great a
consultancy supplier as
it is in everything else
it does.”
The link, where it
exists, is much softer —
the quality of Serco’s
consultancy enhances the
overall brand. Where
appropriate, the
consultants can draw on
subject experts from the
wider organisation, but
“farming” Serco’s
existing market, either
at the client or the
sector level, is not a
priority.
“That isn’t something
we’re going to depend on
to get sales,” says
Illsley. “We’re going to
depend on having great
consultants.”
Illsley says the firm
has had considerable
success in recruiting
consultants: “We’re
getting some great
people who can turn
their hand to anything,”
he says — and while the
firm is now looking to
bolster its staff with
content specialists it | |
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| | is still recruiting
people from a wide
variety of backgrounds.
Illsley is
particularly
enthusiastic about
recruiting people with
more esoteric skills,
what he calls “real top
table stuff”.
“We’re currently
looking for enterprise
architects. They’re
quite rare, quite hard
to come by, but once you
have them a lot of
people want them,” he
says. “That gives you a
ticket through the door
and the opportunity to
get into more individual
propositions. We’ve also
got some great expertise
in recovering failed IT
projects—that’s another
rare set of skills that
will help us open
doors.”
Illsley says that
ownership by a larger
group has not been a
constraint. “We’re owned
and we have targets. So
we have a sensible
discussion about what
the right targets should
be,” he says. “The flip
side is that we have
enormous freedom to set
our own agenda, a
fantastic amount of
freedom, in fact.”
This allows Serco
Consulting to be quite
opportunistic—the
acquisition of
enterprise architect | |
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| | skills was originally
intended to be the start
of a push into financial
services, but, in the
event, a project came up
with a major bank.
“We are
opportunists,” he says.
“To be able to go into
an organisation without
preconceptions of who
they are, that’s a good
thing. We’re still going
to be pushing into
financial services. The
idea is to have a
capability and move from
one contiguous space to
the next.”
Right now Illsley’s
priority is to recruit
and retain good
consultants. “To keep
our consultants we need
to have fun and to do
interesting work—the
last thing anyone wants
to do is put reports on
the shelf,” he says. The
future offers many
“tantalising prospects”
and, hopefully, a few
unexpected
opportunities. As
Illsley puts it: “One of
my favourite quotes is
that ‘no plan of battle
survives contact with
the enemy’.”
| |
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| | Commission and most
recently PA Consulting.
“I was happy at PA
and not particularly
interested in moving,”
he says. “But a couple
of ex-colleagues came
across and said Serco
was really interesting,
come and have a look.”
He found, he says, a
“very different kind of
firm — buckets of
integrity. Very
entrepreneurial, which
enables people to excel,
lots of trust and
respect, and a
reputation for
delivering on
promises”.
He acknowledges the
difficulty of running a
consultancy business
inside a larger
organisation. “It’s a
challenge, but someone’s
going to make it work,”
he says. “That’s what
we’re doing.”
Conceptually he
believes an advisory
capability could sit
very comfortably at the
apex of Serco’s work in
delivering, integrating
and developing services.
“Serco has incredible
knowledge and delivery,”
he says. “It’s a
tantalising prospect —
to lever that knowledge | |
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