Are large consultancies the best solution?

very helpful blog t=surely this will help for job seekers

Why do large organisations elect to employ large consultancies? As my boss said when I was contracting for a major service outsourcer, “It’s all decided on a golf course in Surrey”, with the implication that the person deciding had only a vague idea of what he was deciding on. The sales arm of a consultancy will go where the ability to make financial commitments lies. At this level the details of the subject of the decision are irrelevant.

With the greatest represent, I don’t think its that the smaller companies are lacking in skills. Its more like that they just haven’t been heard of, due to lack of advertising, brandname etc. In software, large companies are likely to lead to diseconomies of scale, instead of economies of scale, however a large company would be much better placed to attract and hold customers.

On the subject of a large company having hiring consultants versus doing thing internally, I very much
doubt the immediate balance sheet is the cause of the decision. A sensible company would be thinking long term about weather the field was a competency they want to have in house, from financial, and a political perspective, if the budget figure is a more difficult to justify for an internal source than an external source, and its the same figure, then woe for the company. It would shrink until only the accountant was left!

Never in 31 years in IT have I come across top notch IT staff that worked for the large consultancies.
Purely because of financial reasons.
Makes one wonder who works at these consultanacies?
Have never seen any of the so called large consultancies come up with a top notch solution either?
They are good at producing documents, wall-to-wall paperwork, most sentences consisting of nouns and pronouns, with little or any verbs.
The sad part, most corporations hire them, because you cannot get fired for contracting one of the large consultancies.
Good part is, when the pawpaw hits the fan, we are contracted.
To produce one pager documents with only verbs.
lol

Hi Stuart,

I agree with the sentiments expressed. The perception of some businesses about using a large consultancy seems to solely based on a good pitch by the consultancy about it being able to provide a solid means to supply based on maintaining knowledge of best practice in a particular area – and having a resource pool that can cover all competencies that make up knowledge and delivery in that area end-to-end. For example, Web and E-commerce projects using (say) Oracle or SAP at the large scale corporate end – or MySQL, Java or PHP, etc at the SME end – for (say) the Retail or Energy space. These appear to be popular practices right now.

The reality can be quite different however, if those clients do not understand the large consultancies’ supply chain dynamics and so do not do their due diligence properly on how they are positioned and leveraged to supply based on having other clients, both past and current, who they can and are supplying to.

The issues for the consultancy comes where there is not enough work in the marketplace for the consultancy to retain staff in the area. This is where the role of the Practice Manager comes in, and is one that I performed on several occasions now. The key to success in performing that role is that you have to work closely within the consultancies’ Business Development and Sales teams in doing marketing to understand whether there is sufficient work out there – and often acting as an adjunct to one or more particular vendors in supplying a specific type of solution rather than being geared to supporting a particular industry (as many consultancies would prefer to do) – but then partnering with recruitment agencies, or otherwise intensive and clever networking, to source the relevant resources.

In any case, it is often the good large consultancies that end up doing the pioneering in opening the door for a particular technology or solution to enter an industry – and based on having quite a few staff that they have brought together who have extensive knowledge of that industries’ needs but have just needed a few willing customers with whom to prove the capability and/or delivery.

The other main risk is that the industry subject-matter experts (SMEs) involved with some large consultancies often lose touch with the industry that they are providing the knowledge about for the consultancy – simply through not being in it constantly – and so there may need to be ways to sub them back in as interim managers (or even business or technical support staff). Unfortunately that does not always happen….

In any case, I am working on a new model to either complement or supplement the large consultancy model. This is one whereby the direct contractor solution, that you have referred to, can be brought together with that of the most relevant recruitment staffing agencies in forming what I have termed as being an “open practice” delivery model. I have been building the concept of this up for over a year now and have a LinkedIn group called The UK and European Open Practice Technology Network – with subgroups for the practices covering business model end-to-end that gather together people needed to deliver end-to-end. I am looking to assign Practice Leads to each of those subgroup areas who can act as brokers in bringing the relevant people and business partners together who can deliver to an end-client collaboratively – but, I trust, more cost-effectively than what some of the large consultancies have done to date. Please feel free to join this and give your view on’t!!

All the Best,

Matt Miller
Group Manager, The UK and European Open Practice Technology Network