Clients shouldn’t shy away from exposure of consultancy awards

I’m beginning to suspect my dentist of defrauding me—by scheduling check-ups every five or six weeks instead of every six months. Either that or I’m getting old and the DVD of my life is stuck on fast-forward.

For example, we are faced with another tranche of consultancy awards. Didn’t we just do that?

It’s true that from being positively bashful about its own achievements, the consultancy industry has become an award-rich environment. It was only last December that the IBC held its own awards, and now the MCA has weighed in with its 14th annual Management Awards.

It’s easy to be dismissive about the awards industry—for that is what it has become, and many a West End hotel and light entertainer is the richer for it. You can make a pretty good return on gathering an industry together for a reasonable dinner and handing out a few strangely-shaped glass objects. Everyone ends up feeling good about themselves, and where is the harm?

The difference with consultancy awards is that they genuinely can—and I really don’t care how pretentious this sounds—advance the sum of human knowledge and make the world a better place. The MCA is very careful to stress that these are not consultancy awards but management awards, in which clients get equal billing with their consultants. They position consultancy not as some intermittent bolt-on or fad but as a vital resource that lies at the heart of business—and indeed national life.

Just look at some of the headline-grabbing areas where the awards landed this year. Who isn’t worried about the NHS and the seemingly intractable problem of hospital infections, or its seemingly bottomless appetite for money? Maidstone, a Tonbridge Wells NHS Trust, certainly was after being criticised for its response to clostrum difficile outbreaks in 2007, enough to engage Hay Group to work on their leadership culture. The Trust now has one of the best records on infection control in the region and is meeting national targets while improving financial performance. Meanwhile, Avail has been working on pilot projects with the Department of Health that could save billions if rolled out nationally.

Who’s not worried about the Olympic Park being finished in time for 2010? You might be relieved to know that work started three months early, thanks in part to the speed with which Atos Consulting sorted out the IT infrastructure with CLM, the construction consortium.

Everyone who follows Formula One recognises it as the showcase for the UK’s excellence in top-end manufacturing and engineering skills—and here’s IBM and the Brawn team, winning an award for the manufacturing processes that underpinned Jensen Button’s charge to the Championship. Britain’s leadership in retailing is exemplified by Tesco—which has worked with Deloitte to “green” its IT.

What are you interested in? Banking and data security? Here’s KPMG’s work with the Royal Bank of Scotland, mitigating risk for an organisation under extreme scrutiny. Passports and ID? Look no further than PA Consulting and Identity and Passport Services.

And these are just some of the projects that were actually entered for and won prizes.

Long-term followers of these awards will notice that the same names come up again and again, serial awards winners. There are two explanations (which I hasten to add are by no means mutually exclusive). One is that these are excellent consultancies which deliver excellent results that their clients are happy to talk about. The other is that they actually get their act together every year, to document their greatest achievements and enter these awards. KPMG, for example, had five projects in the running for an award.

This isn’t just a question of coming home with some silverware, or of proving consultancy’s worth to the outside world. It’s about documenting some of the most important work going on in the business world. For all our talk of knowledge management, too much of what is valuable and worth preserving about consultancy projects continues to be lost as projects are recorded either incoherently or not at all. It really shouldn’t be beyond the wit of an organisation capable of reconstructing a bank to write a few hundred words about it in fairly lucid English. Unfortunately the pay-off of good knowledge management is seen as just too diffuse to motivate individuals who always have something better to do—namely more client work. Perhaps a more goal-oriented approach of case studies with a view to winning an actual prize (hopefully supplemented by lavish internal rewards for success) would give a clearer motivation? Note also that “you have to be in it to win it,” so get those membership forms from the MCA and/or IBC now!

Of course there is the need to get clients on board as well, and I’m sure the MCA could have organised a “shadow” awards ceremony for some equally stellar projects that cannot even be whispered about in public. It’s an age-old dilemma, but one that needs to be continually debated particularly in these days of greater and greater disclosure. If as a company I’m expected to report on my exposure to say, long-term environmental risk, shouldn’t I at least mention that my consultants have taken the back off my organisation and are fiddling with its innards? I’m also still surprised by the fact that the investment community doesn’t spend more time trying to work out where the big change projects are and factor that into its analysis.

Clients that are fearful of exposure should look at the MCA Awards, where it’s really all upsides. Consumer and environmental groups, for example, might be sceptical about Tesco’s green credentials—the involvement of Deloitte surely adds credibility and rigour to that claim. When the DoH rolls out its “repeatable methodology for optimising care pathways” it will undoubtedly meet with scepticism (particularly if they insist on continuing to call it that). But there are the documented pilot schemes, and the savings of hundreds of thousands of pounds against demonstrably improved service delivery. To the organisations that use them properly, these awards are worth thousands in terms of marketing and positive internal communications.

In the future, one hopes that savvy clients will no longer wait for their consultants to bribe and cajole them into allowing them to go public with a case study. They should be loudly demanding their advisers pull their fingers out and enter them for every award going.


All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.