Consulting Journal: Trends

Trends: Our popularity

by David Blakey

Why do some people dislike consultants? is it really for the reasons that they give?

[Monday 30 September 2002]

Many people do not like consultants. Sometimes, some of the people within our clients do not like us.

Obvious reasons

There are some obvious reasons for people disliking us.

Money

In most cases, consultants earn more money per hour than the client's employees. This does not mean that we earn more in total than they do, because consultants rarely do billable work every hour of every working day. We have to spend time finding business, either with new clients or with existing ones. We have to spend time winning that business when we have found it. We have our own administrative overhead time, as well. We spend a lot of time learning. But we can be resented because of the amount that we charge for each billable hour for a client.

In most cases, our total annual earnings are actually greater than theirs. In a year, management consultants may earn as much money as the chief executives of their clients.

Accountability

Another source of resentment is that consultants apparently take no responsibility for the success of their recommendations. It depends on the nature of the recommendation. If we recommend that a client takes some action, and they then fail to do so, the consultant is blameless. It is not our fault that a client does not take some action, or that they do it badly.

This is compounded by the fact that some clients are wary of awarding the implementation assignment to the consultant who recommended the implementation in the first place. I have encountered consulting firms that have recommended implementations to their clients that they themselves had the capability to implement. Clients have questioned the impartiality of the recommendation assignments; occasionally I have won business because the previous consulting firm has been fired. To protect themselves against this, many clients have mandated that their implementations cannot be carried out by the same consultants who made the recommendations. The original consultants can then hardly be accused of avoiding accountability.

Other reasons

There are some other reasons why people within our clients may resent consultants.

Long meetings

Some people think that consultants extend meetings unnecessarily to increase their billings. In all my years of consulting, I have never seen this. Often, attempts by consultants to ‘cut to the chase’ by presenting a brief summary are thwarted by questions that are answered in the consultants' report. Some people find it hard to have a brief meeting, take away the report, study it and then return to a subsequent meeting with questions that are not answered by the report. So consultants get involved in a long session of answering questions. When these people do eventually read the consultants' report, they find that the questions have already been answered. Rather than realizing that their own idiocy prolonged the meeting, they blame consultants' greed.

Complex presentations

I have seen complex PowerPoint presentations a few times. These were mainly done by Web developers rather than management consultants. There is rarely a good argument for using animations, video and transitions in a presentation that is intended to get a series of facts across to the client. While I agree that clients should not be billed for the preparation of complex presentations, it is really the clients' responsibility to ensure that their terms of reference for their consultants include simple bullet-point text presentations.

Buzzwords

In one article that I read attacking consultants' use of buzzwords, ASP, OLE, WAP and XML were mentioned as ‘vague, generally misunderstood terms’. I ask if any consultant would use ‘ASP’ without also saying whether they were talking about Active Server Pages or an Application Service Provider, although the context should make it obvious. If I were writing for a reader who was not familiar with standard IT terms, then I might need to explain what OLE, WAP and XML are. To a reader whose profession is IT, there is no need. If a CIO or CTO does not know what OLE, WAP and XML are, then they really should not be in their position.

Real reasons

Many of the problems in the second section are actually caused by the reasons in the first section. Client staff may mask their resentment of consultants' high earnings and low accountability by mentioning long meetings, complex presentations and buzzwords.

One of the major causes of friction is that the client has not bothered to define clear objectives for a consulting assignment. If the outcomes of an assignment were known and understood, then people would understand why the consultants' fees were worth the result, and where the real responsibility for implementing the consultants' recommendations lies.

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