Consultants and knowledge transfer

"Do you/are you going to include knowledge transfer as a part of value creation?"

someone asked me. But consultants are less purveyors of knowledge than knowledge brokers. They facilitate transfer of knowledge between client parties rather than from themselves to the client. Andrew Sturdy at Warwick knows this. He and his colleagues on an ESRC project spent months doing the sort of research I'd love to do. It was reported here in 2007.

So my thesis will have to explain something about knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange.

Field work equipment

For the full interviews:

• digital voice recorder
• informed consent form
• interview schedule
• information sheet

For observation

• Field diary to record activities of research, impressions, procedures, location, office layout, interview experiences
• Camera to capture images of working environments. There's been little opportunity to use it though, due to restrictions on premises, or personal privacy issues, or I just haven't asked permission.

Methodology

Different dissertations have different ways of tackling the methodology chapter. Cranfield dissertations have definite chapters that cover the why, the philosophy, the forms of knowing. Such chapters may or may not include the method, the how the question was researched, as well as the why the question was researched this way. I suspect other countries have other ways of approaching this chapter. I have a sample of only one - a dissertation from Denmark, where the methodology chapter is written in quite a different way.

The methodology for a qualitative approach has to be as rigorously made as for a quantitative approach.

What I'd like to find are other dissertations from the UK, preferably qualitative dissertations so I can how the argument is made for the research approach.

Theoretical framework

This research is of clients’ relationships with consultants in public sector information technology (IT) projects. It will seek to identify and explain how the client engages with consultants and other suppliers in order to add value to a project.

The research question is:

How do public sector organisations engage with consultants in order to contribute to an effective IT project?

Sub questions include:

1. How does engagement contribute to an effective project?
2. How does engagement influence relationships?
3. How does the quality of relationships contribute to an effective project?
4. How does engagement vary over the life cycle of a project?
5. How does engagement help in adding value to a project?

Empirical answers to these questions could fill the gap on understanding engagement between clients and consultants. Insights could also contribute to public sector practical management of external consultants to reap value from their contribution to a project.

A review of the literature on consultancy has shown that client entities and relationships are complex. This and the literature on project management show that clients must engage with consultants for good project outcomes. A review of the literature on engagement focused on conceptualisations of engagement but also explored its various articulations. However, the literature has little to say on what client-consultant engagement might be. It is not clear how engagement manifests itself, what its factors might be or what sort of engagement leads to effective consultancy projects.

The literature on social capital allows a conceptualisation of the issue of engagement between consultants and clients on IT projects. The following sections will explain how social capital might be used as a framework for this exploration.

1 What is the problem?
Public sector IT projects often use external consultants, but are also notoriously expensive and often fail. A common cause of project failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders (OGC, 2002). In the public sector, engagement is “a critical element of a consulting project” (NAO, 2006a). The National Audit Office (NAO) exhorts clients and consultants to engage to ensure commitment, thus implying that engagement will improve performance and add value to a project. Public servants are advised to engage with consultants and consultants with their clients, but it is not clear how engagement happens or what a good quality of engagement is.
Czerniawska (Czerniawska, 2006) implies two meanings to the term ‘engagement’: the contractual engagement and the relationship. A contract of engagement may mean only initial seeking and selection but this research concerns the longer term relationship regardless of contractual arrangements. Unfortunately Czerniawska has little to say on the value of engagement as a longer term developed relationship, although she recognises that engagement as a relationship determines the success of consulting projects.

The NAO exhortation for engagement seems to be aiming at continued shared understanding; engagement must be mutual. The NAO considers from the findings of case studies that senior level engagement is crucial for successful delivery of IT enabled change (NAO, 2006c) because such engagement demonstrates senior management is committed to the change. This NAO report(NAO, 2006c) requires demonstration of commitment through engagement whilst the other NAO report (NAO, 2006a) requires ensuring commitment through engagement. There might be some confusion or inconsistency of understanding of what engagement means and does for an organisation.

So confusion and inconsistency suggest that it is a problem to understand engagement. Whether engagement is a knowable phenomenon is a moot point. Definitions of engagement are woolly and soft. Hence engagement is “a paradigm for change” (Axelrod, 2001), “the art of bringing people together” (Block, 2000), “a journey of sensing and learning” (Buckingham, 2005). It is also a two way relationship between employee and employer (Robinson D, 2004), a management philosophy (Smythe, 2007) and “a process of communication” (McMaster, 1996). Mutual engagement is a dimension of a community of practice that involves processes of community building (Wenger, 1998). In summary, engagement is a paradigm, a journey, a relationship, a philosophy, a process, an art and to the NAO “an element of a consulting project”. This variety of metaphors suggests engagement is a constructed phenomenon.

Since different constructions seem to conflate engagement with other phenomena like involvement, participation, commitment, collaboration or even motivation, I explored them in the hope of clarifying some concepts of engagement. Previous research on engagement seems to have focused on outcomes and products, being mainly surveys or quasi-experimental (Gable, 1996, Saks, 2006, Schaufeli et al., 2006) but the research question requires looking at the process of engagement and how connecting people builds trust and the commitment that the NAO wants to ensure. That process includes an ongoing negotiation of meaning (Wenger, 1998). Exploration of how meaning is negotiated might be possible using the concept of social capital. Adler and Kwon { 2002 } identify social capital as “as the good will that is engendered by the fabric of social relations and that can be mobilized to facilitate action". It may be possible to relate “the fabric of social relations” to the client-consultant relationship and the “mobilisation of goodwill to engagement”. Hence, the concept of social capital could help in exploring client-consultant engagement.
2 Why is this framework feasible?
Social capital theory can provide a way to explore engagement in relationships between clients and consultants. Its literature provides a framework for performing the specific investigation that is being proposed.

Social capital can be conceptualised as a stock of networks, norms and trust. People develop social capital in organisations. Organisations nurture social capital, which supports the development of intellectual capital because it comes though interaction of people sharing knowledge (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). Sharing knowledge, norms, and establishing social capital through people coming together on a project, provides the organisation with an advantage.

Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998) suggest three dimensions for creating intellectual capital through social capital:

• the structural dimension of network ties, configuration and appropriable organisation,
  
• the cognitive dimension of shared codes, language and narratives, and
  
• the relationship dimension of trust, established norms and obligations of how people behave.
  

Each dimension contributes in different combinations to create new intellectual capital. Combinations of the dimensions of social capital allow exchange of intellectual capital, and anticipation of value through that exchange. Value anticipated in an IT project may be other than an exchange of intellectual capital. Value may be gained from a project that delivers on time, to budget, and meets all or most of the objectives set for it. These project attributes are valuable to the parties involved. Delivery of such IT projects may be facilitated through a combination of the dimensions of social capital.

The social capital framework guides the interview questions, the three dimensions providing headings for asking questions of interviewees about relationships, concepts used and understanding.
The interview schedule relates the research question and sub questions through the social capital framework.
Questions are based round four headings:

1. background (of project and participant),
2. relationships,
3. knowledge (or learning), and
4. value.

Background is important because it provides the context. The questions may elicit structural dimensions of social capital.
Relationships matter. How do the relationships create value? The interview questions here concern social capital in the relationship and structural dimensions. Questions are to identify networks of relationships and the strength of ties between people. One question asks for a specific anecdote or story in an attempt to get more precise descriptions rather than general opinion. See {Kvale, 1996 }. These questions also aim to elicit lack of engagement in relationships, in order to reveal if the consultant and client have little in common, or need no more than a passing connection.
Knowledge: rather than directly asking about knowledge the questions are about learning and what people have learned from each other. How do they use that knowledge? This gives some idea of what value has developed from relationships.
Value: Building shared meanings is part of the cognitive dimension of social capital. There may be value gained through learning and sharing meaning. Sharing meaning may provide valuable non-financial, un-measurable qualitative gain.

Some interview questions elicit information in more than one dimension.

In summary, social capital theory offers enough complexity to provide a conceptual framework for the examination of issues of engagement between clients and consultants.

Is that completely clear? Will it be clear to my supervisors?

---

ADLER, P. S. & KWON, S.-W. (2002) SOCIAL CAPITAL: PROSPECTS FOR A NEW CONCEPT. Academy of Management Review, 27, 17-40.
AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BLOCK, P. (2000) Flawless Consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer.
BUCKINGHAM, M. (2005) Chapter FOUR: 'Buy-in', not by-pass: the rules of engagement. Leadership for Leaders. Thorogood Publishing Ltd.
CZERNIAWSKA, F. (2006) Ensuring sustainable value from consultants. MCA. Management Consultancy Association.
GABLE, G. G. (1996) A multidimensional model of client success when engaging external consultants. Management Science, 42, 1175-1198.
KVALE, S. (1996) InterViews : an introduction to qualitative research interviewing, Thousand Oaks, CA ; London, Sage.
MCMASTER, M. D. (1996) The Intelligence Advantage: organizing for complexity, Butterworth-Heinemann.
NAHAPIET, J. & GHOSHAL, S. (1998) Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23, 242-266.
NAO (2006a) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment. IN NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (Ed.). HMSO.
NAO (2006b) Delivering successful IT-enabled business change: Case studies of success. IN NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (Ed.). HMSO.
OGC (2002) Common Causes of Project Failure. National Audit Office and the Office of Government Commerce.
ROBINSON D, P. S., HAYDAY S (2004) The Drivers of Employee Engagement. Institute for Employment Studies.
SAKS, A. M. (2006) Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21, 600-619.
SCHAUFELI, W. B., BAKKER, A. B. & SALANOVA, M. (2006) The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study. Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66, 701-716.
SMYTHE, J. (2007) The CEO chief engagement officer: turning hierarchy upside down to drive performance, Gower.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Graduate junction

I've spent the morning browsing the Graduate Junction, because there are several papers in there on writing and how to write. One set of papers comes from students, and another set from established academics. I recommend joining the Graduate Junction if only to get the chance to read such advice. Go to the page on writing at http://www.graduatejunction.org/wows.

Acknowledgement

Discovered on reading her recent PhD thesis

Initiations, interactions, cognoscenti: social and cultural capital in the music festival experience

that our fellow PG includes us in her acknowledgements:

"Thanks especially to my fellow coffee-drinking PhD students who kept me going: Ann, Ting, Tom, Liz, Dannie, Ross and Dan"

How nice!

Who would you acknowledge?

One step forward, one back

I thought I'd got the chance of another case study, spoke to one person involved with the IT project, but then was told that limited resources and business pressures prevented any further discussion.

One step forward, one back

It could be worse; it could be two steps back. Two steps back would be a person asking me not to use already gathered material.

In Alice in the Looking Glass, the red Queen advises:

"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

To finish my PhD within the funded time, I need to go twice as fast. That means I probably need twice as many case studies as I have access to. Oh glum!

Theoretical framework

First what is the problem and then why is my proposed framework a good idea?
1 What is the problem?
A problem of managing consultants and their costs in the public sector exists. Public sector IT projects often use external consultants, but are also notoriously expensive and often fail. A common cause of project failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders (OGC, 2002). In the public sector, engagement is “a critical element of a consulting project”. But understanding engagement is a problem because different constructions seem to conflate engagement with other phenomena like involvement, participation, commitment, collaboration or even motivation,

The research question requires looking at the process of engagement and how connecting people, and creating communities, builds trust and the commitment that the National Audit Office wants to ensure. That process includes an ongoing negotiation of meaning (Wenger, 1998). Exploration of how meaning is negotiated might be possible using the concept of social capital. Adler and Adler( 2002) identify social capital as

“as the good will that is engendered by the fabric of social relations and that can be mobilized to facilitate action".

It may be possible to relate “the fabric of social relations” to the client-consultant relationship and the “mobilisation of goodwill to engagement”. Hence, the concept of social capital could help in exploring client-consultant engagement.

2 Why is this framework feasible?
Social capital theory can provide a way to explore engagement in relationships between clients and consultants. Its literature provides a framework for performing the specific investigation that is being proposed.

Social capital can be conceptualised as a stock of networks, norms and trust. People develop social capital in organisations. Organisations nurture social capital, which supports the development of intellectual capital because it comes though interaction by people sharing knowledge (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998). Sharing knowledge, norms, and establishing social capital through people coming together on a project, provides the organisation with an advantage.

Nahapiet & Ghoshal (1998) suggest three dimensions for creating intellectual capital through social capital:

1. the structural dimension of network ties, configuration and appropriable organisation,
2. the cognitive dimension of shared codes, language and narratives,
3. the relationship dimension of trust, established norms and obligations of how people behave.

Each dimension contributes in different combinations to create new intellectual capital. Combinations of the dimensions of social capital allow exchange of intellectual capital, and anticipation of value through that exchange. Value anticipated in an IT project may be other than an exchange of intellectual capital. Value may be gained from a project that delivers on time, to budget, and meets all or most of the objectives set for it. These project attributes are valuable to the parties involved. Delivery of such IT projects may be facilitated through a combination of the dimensions of social capital.

This social capital framework guides the interview questions, the three dimensions providing headings for asking questions of interviewees about relationships, concepts used and understanding.

The interview schedule relates the research question and sub questions through the social capital framework. Questions are based round four headings (see earlier posting):

• background (of project and participant),
• relationships,
• knowledge (or learning), and
• value.

Supervisors want to be reminded of the framework. I hope they're happy because that's I've been using for nine months.

---

OGC (2002) Common Causes of Project Failure. National Audit Office and the Office of Government Commerce.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
ADLER, P. S. & KWON, S.-W. (2002) SOCIAL CAPITAL: PROSPECTS FOR A NEW CONCEPT. Academy of Management Review, 27, 17-40.
NAHAPIET, J. & GHOSHAL, S. (1998) Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23, 242-266.

Asking stupid questions

Recently, a world business radio 4 programme interviewed a couple of Icelandic women founders of a new Icelandic investment company called Audur. See Peter Day's comment here. They say that women in business are risk aware, rather than risk averse, so not afraid to ask stupid questions.

Stupid questions are what I think I'm asking sometimes when I'm talking with my research interviewees. Usually, it's a three letter acronym (TLA) that throws me, like:

• 'MOJ' - Ministry of Justice, which is a new government department so not an acronym that I've yet often come across.
• SRM - supplier relationship management. I've known about CRM - customer relationship management for a long time, so from the context I could work out what SRM was.
• Framework agreements - I'd just accepted the term, but when someone talked about 'corofs' I had to stop and ask, so was that a silly question? The interviewee spelled it out for me CALL-OFFs. The accent was different from mine, and I knew too little about procurement to have recognised the term. Once I'd learnt, I looked up call-offs and learnt much more about UK government framework agreements from here and here.
  

But I do feel embarrased and vulnerable when I don't know something or can't hear it. I hardly dare ask because perhaps my interviewee won't share more because I'm so ignorant. But that's why I'm asking people, so I can learn.

So yes, I'm risk aware and I must keep on asking the stupid questions.

Social capital literature

Lee has just published in the International Journal of Management reviews, a comprehensive review of the literature on social capital. The article is called Social capital and business and management: Setting a research agenda.

This is a comprehensive and systematic review (it indicates an audit trail) of relevant literature on social capital. There's an emphasis on the three dimensions that Napahiet & Ghosal write about, but with a comment on the dearth of understanding of cognitive social capital.

Lee argues (page 258):

"social actors that share meaningful communication attain synergy. Efficient use of co-operative language, codes and narratives among social actors creates such a synergy."

Mixed method research is recommended to establish links between social networks and something... - "agents acting out relational and cognitive actions"

Implications for research include looking at the linkages between structural, relational and cognitive social capital. In particular "cognitive social capital and the overall impact of shared language, codes and narratives remain neglected."

Useful stuff if you're researching social capital, which I'm not. I'm using the dimensions of social capital as a framework to understand how engagement might happen.

---

LEE, R. (2009) Social capital and business and management: Setting a research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11, 247-273.
NAHAPIET, J. & GHOSHAL, S. (1998) Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23, 242-266.

Holiday

Some students are thinking of having a holiday. We're supposed to ask our supervisors for permission, but they aren't around - they're on holiday (or sabbatical). After reading this PhD comic, I reckon that what they aren't around to know, they don't need to know.

Wisdom

I've got a note on my kitchen wall:

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest, second, by imitation, which is easiest, and third, by experience, which is the bitterest". Confucius.

I suspect these are the three methods by which I must learn to write. Reflection comes from the data and reading. I must imitate the best writers. The experience comes when no-one reads my writing. At least my supervisors read it, even if they say horrible things about it.

Writing overload

I may have a case study on paper, but it's only a draft, and it's still so so mixed up .

But I've more to write. For example,

• Supervisor #1 wants to be reminded of my framework.
• Supervisors want me to rewrite those parts that were "completely unclear"
  
• I've got some ideas to write down about control, risk and behaviour being involved with engagement.
• I still haven't written anything about methodology for the supervisors - I wonder if they haven't asked yet because they've been more concerned about collecting data.

Third year stress looms!

Written, not just in my head

I've written up a case study - only short, only a description of the case, no analysis or comment, under the headings:

• Background
  
• Project description
• Interviewees
  
• Project actors
  
• Project outcome
• Case discussion:Structural social capital, Relational social capital, Cognitive social capital
• Consequences

It probably won't be right for my supervisors. I'll have to write it again. And again. And again. But at least I've got something written, so it's out. Not in my head.

Post grads as legitimate peripheral participants

Legitimate peripheral participants are participants in an activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991), but on the edge of the activity, hence peripheral. They are legitimate when they are meant to be there, involved and usually learning. Post grads are in training in research so are legitimate and peripheral, but I'm not sure that they get to participate in research activities.
Research activities include:

• teaching,
  
• analysis,
  
• coding,
  
• perhaps interviewing and transcribing.

Open University post grads don't get training or any opportunity to teach, as I've previously mentioned.

The doctoral training workshop (DTW) sessions provide some training, but not learning by doing. For example, the DTW includes a session on interviewing, but not on transcription, or on coding of qualitative data. It's up to the PG to read up. And if you don't realise the issues, then you don't deliberately read up on the skills. Until I read Kvale (1996), and then Tilley (2003), I had considered transcription a chore, not a skill that required reflection. I believed I could create an objective representation of the dialogue that had taken place. But now I'm not so sure and have questions:

• where do I punctuate?
• was that remark a query or a statement?
• which transcript is more accurate - mine or that of the paid transcriber? For example, one of us heard "certain reviews" and the other heard "similar views".

As a legitimate peripheral participant, post grads could be learning from skilled teachers and researchers. For teaching, each PG should be assigned to an OU course with requirements to research relevant literature including web links and current news for the course team, perhaps also proof reading tutor marked assignment (TMA) questions and tutor notes. PGs could be trained on electronic asynchronous forums where they could moderate and be web masters for the course, They could learn about teaching through giving electronic tutorials - the OU uses Elluminate.

For PGs doing qualitative research, they need the chance to shadow experienced interviewers, observing how it's done. They could transcribe someone else's research, and then discuss issues arising from it, so having the experience to reflect on their own transcriptions.

I don't have enough experience to think yet what "sitting next to Nellie" experience a post grad following a quantitative approach would benefit from.

I suspect other universities not just the OU, fail their post grads on these skills, but if the PhD is really a training in research, then post grads must participate in research, and as trainees, they are peripheral. Universities that espouse learning, must legitimate that participation.

---

LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing
TILLEY, S. A. (2003) "Challenging" Research Practices: Turning a Critical Lens on the Work of Transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 9.

Interview quotes

Kvale has some guidelines for reporting interview quotes. It's timely that I've found them, because I'm just writing up some interviews, and before now, my supervisors have criticised my writing for having too many quotes, over-long quotes, and not linking quotes up with my own explanations.

Kvale suggests:

1. relate quotes to the general text
2. contextualise the quotes
3. interpret the quotes
4. there should be a balance between quotes and text
5. quotes should be short
6. use only the best quote
7. interview quotes should be rendered in a written style
8. there should be a simple signature system for editing the quotes.

Kvale expands on each of these guidelines - they're worth reading.

---

Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing (page 266, Box 14.4)

Structuring an interview report

My research depends a lot on interview data so how do I structure an interview report? Kvale suggests:

• Thematising
• Method
• Results
• Discussion

Thematising: state the purpose, concepts and theoretical understanding, review the literature and formulate research questions.
Method: state design, interviewing transcribing and analysis. Describe methods so the reader can ascertain the relevance of the design for the topic and purpose of the investigation to evaluate the trustworthiness and to be able to replicate the investigation.
Results: state analysis and verification. Overview the main findings. Evaluate reliability, validity and generalisation.
Discussion: discuss overall implications. Discuss relevance of findings to the research questions and the theoretical and practical implication of the findings.

I guess that this is about the same as the PhD thesis structure. But do I write such a report for each interview? for each group of interviews related to the same project? or for all the interviews that I collect? The first two sections, thematising and method, should be the same for all the interviews I do, but results differ, so the discussion must differ for each interview and for each project, which is why I expect to write a chapter, for each case study, a case study being around one project. Hence, four case studies should lead to four chapters in the dissertation. Then there must be another chapter on results, and a chapter that discusses the implications from all four case studies.

And I wonder how I can fit in the information I'm getting from ad-hoc interviews with people who aren't on a particular project. Perhaps my supervisors will have a good idea - I'll ask them sometime.

---

Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing (page 263)

Open University on BBC last night

Did you see the Open University on BBC last night? You can see it for the next seven days here. This is what it was like in the sixties - lots of people didn't expect to get a degree. People didn't expect and weren't expected to get a degree. Lenny Henry, who presents the programme, is an OU graduate and he tells you what it was like when you saw all these people around you with degrees and you hadn't.

The Open University was controversially new, an opportunity helped by the advent of television, and Michael Young realising that in the USSR they were using radio to educate people and telling Harold Wilson. Fancy that! The OU came out of soviet Russia.

There was hostility. But Jennie Lee argued for it. Thank goodness for these people. I suspect in today's climate we'd never get the OU going because there aren't politicians who would take it as seriously.

Rewriting again

Supervisors have received my rewrite of a case study, and still are not happy. Parts are

"completely unclear".

Oh dear.

I'll have to try again. Sometimes, I think a PhD is a three year course on writing and rewriting and writing again.