Originally Posted by
andrewn
Agreed, but at least if somebody external has told you the time you can then blame somebody elses timekeeping, as opposed to your own, when it turns out to have been the wrong time
Sounds silly, but it's actually the logic used by a lot of very large organisations when it comes to spending vast sums of money on Consulting firms.
At the risk of ongoing thread drift, couldn't agree more with the sentiments expressed on the value of consultants. In my last unit we were subjected to a transformation programme managed - and I use that word in its loosest sense - by one of the big name consultancies who traditionally target military leavers. They were so bad they broke the organisation and ended up being fired by the 1-star who got so fed up that he thanked them for their work and suggested we had sufficient experience to take their recommendations forward. About 12 months too late to avoid catastrophic damage to morale.
Their expertise saw a manning structure devised on the basis of scouring an out of date email list with entries containing the 3 letters of our section. As a result they came back with all sorts of irrelevant names that were supposedly part of our organisation - if only - I would loved to have tried telling a US Army Lt Col that she now reported to me according to the consultants. At another meeting they came up with a revised process which enabled a rapid response to team generation in only 14 steps and about 4 days. My Colonel turned to me and said - Melchie, before we started this, how quickly could you pull a mission team together? To which I replied, 4 steps and a couple of hours - maybe a morning for a complex issue - as long as I was given authority to pull people I needed and to pause other lower priority Ops tasking. My Flt Lt and SAC even ended up learning to code to de-bug and re-write the task management system that singularly failed to achieve any of its objectives. All I can say is I hope our old 3-star kept the receipt for the services he procured. Not that he'll need it as he missed out on the recent Air Officer shuffling so will be Mr by summer.
The moral of my ramblings - I've always been against consultants to act as anything other than a Red Team. We have the experience we need in house, lets tap into it. Select experienced officers to be put through relevant management training and when they retire at 55, re-employ them as internal MOD consultants on projects. That way they would at least understand military concepts that seem to bypass external spreadsheet ninjas who know the cost of everything but not the value and for whom process rather than output is key.