Ten months ago I wrote a blog-post called "Do Even More With Less" . I talked about a government department that had to find savings of a billion dollars a year every year for 10 years. To put it another way that is $2,732,240 a day for 3,522 days! At the time I said it was an impossible task and quite unrealistic.  I also said:

I think we are heading down the path of a disillusioned public service. The service will try to be efficient at the expense of being effective, and achieve neither goal. We will see more outsourcing, right-sizing, reshaping and so on, all at the expense of people and ultimately customers. A consultants and contractors paradise is on the horizon as they pick up the slack! From a knowledge management perspective we will see the transfer of knowledge from the public service to private enterprise, and the taxpayer will pay a premium to access it.

Well my prediction has come true, and it's proving to be awfully expensive and disheartening. The first step was to employ two prestigious management consultant companies from this list to provide advice on how to proceed - a step I'm reliably told cost several million dollars, but only added two or three days to the organisations $2,732,240 a day pain!

I've had the dubious honour of reading their reports, and even to speak to a couple of the consultants. Coming from two of the top 50 companies I expected innovative insightful recommendations. Instead the report is full of management text book recommendations which are big on the what, but totally devoid of the how and why.

The middle-managers and knowledge wokers just loved being told by a 25-year old consultant that their organisation should adopt a lean manufacturing approach which will realise 15% efficiencies - not the required 5% but 15%!  The fact that he didn't even speak to them before producing the report, and had no idea of the demand drivers that shape the business beggars belief! It became downright dishonest when on further cross examination they were told that the organisation was benchmarked against another international organisation, but they can't know who that organisation is because it's "propriety information" held in a "proprietary database", and "we have to protect client confidentiality". I must remember that for my business. I'm sure I could knock together a database in short order, call it a propriety database, and hide behind it!

Over the years I've had a bit to do with tier one management consulting firms . I've never been impressed with their product. The trouble is unrealistic unreasonable targets cause people to look for the silver bullet solution - and that can only be delivered by international companies who charge outrageous prices for their advice. Unfortunately senior management, having paid big dollars for this advice feel they have to act on it, at which point the blood-sucking consultants have their teeth into the organisation.

My advice - employ the small companies and the boutique companies. They have more to lose, value the work, and might even try to build an honest relationship rather than seeing you as a perpetual cash-cow. (The term cash-cow was developed by one of the tier one management consulting firms .) Honesty, transparency, and the hows and whys matter!

Regards Graham