The Sunday Times reported a couple of weeks ago that the government is considering setting up its own in-house management consultancy in a drive to spend less with external advisory firms such as McKinsey and KPMG. The consulting arm would sit within Francis Maude’s Cabinet Office, which – with the recently announced help of Sir Philip Green – is attempting to squeeze inefficiencies out of central government and drive a harder bargain with private sector contractors. Mr Maude wants to use this new consulting unit to share good ideas and technologies across departments, whilst at the same time encouraging good back office functions such as HR or Finance to effectively become shared service centres for other government departments.
With central government consulting spend estimated to be somewhere around £3 billion per annum, this is a great initiative if the reports are accurate. And how can it best be made to work? Ironically, by using consultants.
Central government has clearly created an unhealthy dependency on large consulting organisations. Like any large and complex organisation, government departments need to cultivate and own many of the skills and capabilities that they have instead resorted to buying in. At the same time, as with any professional discipline, there is a clear place for leveraging external expertise, provided there is absolute clarity as to why and how that expertise is being deployed. In the case of consultancy, the good reasons for drawing on such skills are:
- to ensure access to fresh, current and objective thinking, inspired and informed by sharing good practice in and beyond central government
- to provide a working environment and culture that is conducive to attracting, retaining and developing really high-quality consultants who are driven by a desire to contribute to the transformation of public service delivery
- most importantly, to develop skills and capability both in the internal consulting team and also in the line. This is extraordinarily difficult to get from the large consultancies, whose business model compels them to sell in whole delivery teams – an approach that is not only very expensive but also restricts development opportunities for internal staff.
Ignite has written to Mr Maude offering to help him and his staff get the best possible internal consultancy model in place. The key is to get leverage from external consultants, getting them to work in as light-touch a way as possible with government staff on projects, providing coaching, training, development and ongoing access to online tools and approaches. The consultants’ objective must be to cultivate growing self-sufficiency, not to create dependency on external advisors – the mentality that has led to the current working models and levels of spend. We fundamentally oppose this as a consulting philosophy and do not employ the armies of people that the big consultancies do.
With this approach there is every opportunity for central government to establish a long-term internal capability that will be able to do far more than keep costs down. It should become a centre of knowledge and excellence, run on a similar model to good consulting firms, constantly seeking new insights into great practice and lessons from the wider world, attracting, retaining and developing great people who will have the knowledge, experience and creativity to be a constant force for innovation and change in the new world of government.
