... what do consultants actually do?
I would assume that being a consultant entails nothing more than being mates with somebody fairly high up in a government department and/or making the occasional large donation to the political party which happens to be in power, but I might be wrong.
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Which doesn't answer the question...
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9 comments:
The Civil Service spends so much money on consultants because Maggie "privatised" (made redundant) all the specialist staff in the Civil Service, all the engineers, scientists, architects, surveyors, IT experts etc etc in order to buy these skills back from the private sector, which was supposed to save money, but actually cost more, because the specialists were replaced by non-specialists who managed the consultants. (One of the best typos I've come across is "conslutant", which sort of gives the right impression.)
Not sure what they do, other than charge like a wounded buffalo, and provide deniability, but Stan Kelly-Bootle reckoned that the job spec required - 'the ability to decamp at high speed, despite the large briefcase and bulging wallet...'
B, Ch, indeed. Which is why the government spends about £1.67 on 'private sector procurement' for every £1 it spends on public sector salaries and pensions; remembering always that only about a quarter of public sector employees are 'front line' in the first place.
So really, the government only spends about ten per cent of its money on 'front line' services (and that's not including welfare and state pensions).
Well, a real consultant is someone who has highly niche skills that you bring in occassionally, get them to do something useful then get rid of them soon after.
I did some work for a small company recently. They'd built a data import routine that was taking 16 hours a day to run, and at growth rate was going to go beyond 24 hours to run. They had a good programmer, but a bit inexperienced. I came in for day, worked out the problem, explained it to the guy (we even coded the changes together), I sent my bill and was out again.
What the government does is just lazy management. They just bring in the big consultancies and tell them to run the whole show for them. They don't have to discipline staff or worry about promotions or anything else - some guy at Accenture does that for them. And of course, they don't care about cost because the taxpayer picks it up.
It's not any cheaper, or better run, because they bill fantastically high sums for what they provide, and once they have built and altered the software, you're then hostage to them because hiring someone else to maintain it has huge costs.
If you have custom software (and you need full time support), it's best to just hire in an internal team, and top it up with contractors and consultants as your demands go over.
The people in companies like IBM, Accenture and CSC are no better than anyone else. They frequently use contractors and go to the same agencies to get staff as everyone else. But you'll pay about double what you pay if you go to an agency yourself.
I've had some experience 'consulting' for a government department - although, in fact, I'm a research analyst and not a 'consultant' per se. My experience, if it can be extrapolated, is that our government employs numpties. So they have to subcontract out to get people with half a brain.
I think you are also required to know what advice the government wants & give it.
Certainl;y "Goberbnebt Chief Science Advisors" have to know that we are suffering catastrophic global warming buty need not know even basic science.
I always assume that consultants charge a fortune to take away any responsibility from management who can always claim "we took advice".
I suppose it's the old Civil Service trick of splitting responsibility. In the old days, whoever started a project never finished it. That way, if the project was a success, both managers could take the credit; if it was a failure they could blame each other. Now it's client and consultant, but the principle is the same.
There are two separate government definitions of "consultant".
One is roughly Joseph's first point = people who're skilled and can do things governments can't do, because they are a bit pants at things (to the extent that someone with six years' private sector experience is actually useful).
But people are being slightly unfair at talking down the second point. An embedded consultant who just does the bloody work is *someone you can fire*. And if you're recruiting someone mid-skilled (ie good uni grad with work experience), 30ish to do a project, that's quite important - because otherwise, they'll join the CS at a grade where they're unfireable.
So if you're a mid-senior manager in the civil service, and you think "hmm, that John B, I could use him for a project but probably if I give him a job he'll just end up picking his toenails on a guaranteed salary for 30 years", then a year of paying $consultancy extortionate rates is still less expensive than a lifetime of carrying the person in question.
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