Mani Masood
Sometimes it’s hard to see what consultancies have actually contributed – or maybe that it should ‘usually’ hard to see.
I have started to believe the latter.
HR Countdown
It’s easy to knock HR departments but in reality they’ve a tough and thankless job sometimes. Yet they’re often terrifyingly easy prey for the predatory consultants.
Take one such department in the engineering industry.
In the bad old days, they had three grades associated with a job. So, you might be an engineer grade 1 (a junior) up to grade 3 (a senior engineer).
Organization not being happy with such clearly woefully inadequate definitions, HR called in a team of “job family consultancy” to look at things.
After a team of five consultants had spent no less than four months going through the company, they called management together for a presentation of their findings. After 35 minutes of very glossy presentation to a large audience, in response to their invitation for questions, someone stood up and said:
“er, as far as I can see, your intensive work has resulted in a recommendation that we abandon the 1-3 grade definitions and now use ‘A’ to ‘D’ instead. Is that it?”
He was quite right. They’d taken four months to come up with the idea of now grading all roles alphabetically not numerically. Little else was changing.
That should do the trick!
In summary
One CEO brought in some very pricey consultants for management consultancy to help define a new business strategic direction. He insisted that his executive team participate in a ‘workshop’ (having failed to grasp that the approach was 30 years out of date) with said consultants.
Predictably, on the day itself, he then managed to absent himself due to a ‘crisis engagement’.
During the first hour, the consultants did what they always do and simply tried to bend with the prevailing wind and play back what people wanted to hear.
The COO had been speaking for some time. When he finished, the senior partner of the consultancy began, “so, to summarize what you’re saying…”
That was too much for the COO
“look, I’m sick of hearing you continually summarize what I or somebody else has just said. It doesn’t need to be summarized because I’ve just said it succinctly enough. Don’t you have an original contribution of your own?”
You can probably guess what’s coming – the consultant’s response –
“So, you think we’re not making a valid original contribution during this session? Is that a fair summary of your frustration?”
He’s clearly going far in consultancy!
My vision is boundless
Fiona’s an IT architecture specialist.
Much against her will, she was ‘ordered’ by her boss to work alongside some consultants wheeled-in to help with strategic technical consultancy defining a 3-year forward view of technical architectures together along with investment recommendations.
As usual, it quickly became apparent that the consultants regarded her as being a token appendage to the team in order to provide some form of smokescreen that the client was actually involved.
In reality, she was ignored completely and regarded as little more than someone who could direct them to where the coffee was or arrange for them to have access to certain systems.
After some months, the first draft was delivered. Her boss asked for her opinion (in spite of being quoted as a co-contributor, she hadn’t in fact seen it prior to release in draft).
She knew her boss well and could tell from his body language that he didn’t really understand it. Once she read it, she could sort of understand why.
She discussed it with a number of her very smart colleagues and not one could actually understand what the paper was recommending in real terms. In fact, she discovered with a little research that great sections of it appeared to be simply re-hashes of public-domain discussions of technical trends and opportunities. Maybe it wasn’t quite plagiarism but it wasn’t original thinking either.
When raising her outraged concerns to her boss, she was told that at least the study and paper had got people thinking about things and asking the right questions.
True – including those many people who are now openly questioning whether or not he is fit for purpose!
Mani
