How To Use Consultants

Like a baby learning to talk, we often absorb new skills by mimicking those around us; without realising. That was how I learned best practice in using management consultants, simply by observing my colleagues at Chiltern Railways.

One of the most important characteristics of using a consultant at Chiltern Railways was the infrequency with which we did it.

In this post, I’m going to share a few true stories which explain why.

Because I’m telling them to illustrate broader points - not to call out individual firms - I will replace their names with those of fast food restaurants.

Experts not Consultants

Too often, consultants are hired not to provide expertise but to validate decisions that the organisation ought to be able to make itself. At one point in my career, a very senior person explicitly told me that, even though my team had already done great work on a strategic problem, we couldn’t update it ourselves. Why? Because he needed to be able to say it had been done by McDonalds.

By contrast, we never even spoke of “consultants” at Chiltern Railways. We spoke of “experts”. There were times when we needed advice from someone with knowledge or skills that we didn’t possess and couldn’t justify hiring full-time. Legal advice was a good example. But there were others.

I remember on one occasion, our parent company Arriva telling us that (despite an unrivalled track record of innovation), they couldn’t prove in franchise bids that we’d innovated because we’d never bid for Innovate UK funding. They’d be very grateful if we’d win some Innovate UK bids, please.

We had no idea how to win Innovate UK bids, which is a specialist activity quite distant from actual innovation. So we hired an expert. We told him some of the things we wanted to do, and he wrote it up in the right language.

Use your own expertise

Chiltern Railways employed capable bright people (and me; sorry), and utilised them. If you worked at Chiltern Railways, you were expected to use your own judgement to the full. So we didn’t go out and hire consultants to answer questions that we could answer ourselves.

I was very pleased to discover this, as at a previous employer, National Express, it sometimes felt like the opposite. If a question was big and important, it was almost assumed it had to be answered externally.

For example, they once decided to create a network of pick-up and drop-off points at motorway service areas. Instead of asking the existing planning team to do the work, they hired KFC.

KFC did a great job at producing a comprehensive and detailed piece of analysis, accompanied by an enormous PowerPoint deck. Unfortunately, at no point, did they mention that picking up or setting down at a Motorway service area is illegal, thus making the whole six-figure piece of analysis pointless.

I suspect some of our own planners would have known this.

Hire people if you need people

Often, in big organisations, it’s impossible to get authority to hire a person but it’s easy to hire a consultant. As a result, when there’s a sudden spike in work, the only option is to hire lots of consultants.

I was involved in a major DfT-led smart ticketing programme. It started very suddenly and the DfT didn’t have in-house resources to manage it. So, not unsurprisingly, they hired Burger King. The problem is, of course, that while Burger King’s people were highly experienced and capable experts, they were’t incentivised to say “this is clearly a long-term project. You’ll have much lower costs than us if you simply hire some in-house project managers”.

You can probably guess the rest…

Keep control

If you do need to hire experts, keep them on a tight leash. I have been surprised by the extent to which consultants in big firms can be allowed to set their own work. On one occasion, I was involved in a change programme and I was asked to come up with a new, cheaper structure for my area.

That’s a sensible thing to do when costs are tight and isn’t that hard.

However, change consultants Pizza Hut were assigned to support me and started turning up to the meetings. And creating PowerPoints. With diagrams. Frequently, three of them would come to the same meeting, even if I’d said I didn’t need help. I could never find who was telling them to support me so they kept turning up.

I have a suspicion they were telling themselves. 

Remember where the risk lies

One example of when we did hire experts at Chiltern Railways was to create the revenue model for the new Oxford line. This was of a complexity beyond the scope of our internal capabilities. Dixie Chicken did a great job for us. But we never forgot that, if it was wrong, Dixie Chicken would be off doing something else, for someone else.

Whereas we were stuck with the consequences. So we asked lots of questions and did our own common-sense checks.

I’ve told the story of demand-responsive shuttle service Dot2Dot previously on this blog, so I won’t repeat it here. But it’s a great example of where over-reliance on a consultant’s modelling can blind an organisation to the fact that the organisation has a lot more to lose - and a lot more capability to validate and test.

In summary

• Only bring in outside help if they have expertise you lack

• Don’t use them to validate decisions you’re capable of making

• Where possible, build expertise in-house

• Remember consultants aren’t incentivised to save you money

• Remember consultants won’t face long term consequences, so check their work

I hope you find this useful. These are all lessons I didn’t realise I was learning - I just absorbed them from my environment. But now I’ve rationalised them and itemised them, I think they’re useful.

Consultants can be invaluable: for expertise you don’t have, for emergency additional capacity and as a source of advice.

Just remember who’s the boss and never lose faith in your own expertise. 

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I’m a consultant. Well, I’d say I’m an expert. I help organisations with their decision-making to get things done faster.

The expertise I bring is having worked in highly entrepreneurial and innovative organisations in our sector, and having spent years researching the ways you can change your decision-making to get things done faster.

I do one-off workshops and awaydays, or short-sharp assignments.

If that sounds useful, let’s talk