I looked at the client-consultant relationship in the public sector because public sector clients were paying too much and not managing their suppliers. The evidence for this came from media and from a series of reports that the National Audit Office published in the mid 2000s. The evidence was that
- IT projects were not being managed
- consultants were not being managed.
I put the two together, identified an NAO report that said that engagement between clients and consultants was important to a project relationship {NAO, 2006}, but found no academic research to cast light on such engagement. So here was a project asking to be researched.
What piqued my original interest arose from my MBA research in the early 1990s when a consultancy firm asked me to research the market for selling their services in the NHS. I thought the NHS managers ought to know what they were paying for and how much they ought to pay.
NAO. 2006. Central Government's Use of Consultants: Building Client and Consultant Commitment, Vol. Supporting paper 1. London: HMSO.
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