Managing consultants and outsourcers

A complication of project work is the number of stakeholders. Not infrequently, consultants and outsourcers work on the same project, particularly in IT. Peled in Israel researched the relationship between government bureaucrats, consultants and vendors looking to see who won or lost power when the government outsourced {Peled, 2001}. My diagram indicates the complicated relationships. It also shows that the consultants are a conduit between client and subcontractors.

Peled's analysis of interviews and participative observation found that the bureaucrats suffered a loss of management skills when using consultants, specifically feedback, negotiation, legal and accounting skills because the consultants negotiated with and supervised vendors. Unchecked power of IT consultants hindered management's ability to account. When projects failed, few bureaucrats knew the IT systems for which they were responsible, nor how failures could have been avoided. Peled recommends that bureaucrats must develop an interest in technological projects. On a project that involves a vendor or outsourcing to a third party as well as use of consultants, Peled suggests potential controls on consultants' work such as acknowledging consultants rather than hiding them.

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Peled, D. A. 2001. Outsourcing and Political Power: Bureaucrats, Consultants, Vendors and Public Information Technology. Public Personnel Management, 30(4): 495.

Engagement

I know engagement is a good thing, but I'm not quite clear what it is:

• commitment
• participation
• involvement
• ?
  

If clients must engage with consultants, then what does engagement entail? Here's my comparison of understanding of engagement in the literature.

Category	Citation	Understanding	Comments
Government	.NAO, 2006	Departments lacked engagement with supplier & community Engagement should be both of people in the organisation and among the consultants. Engagement implies gaining enthusiasm and energy to see the project through to conclusion.	..
Government	.NAO, 2006	Engagement leads to commitment, and NAO 1. developed framework for building commitment & 2. made recommendations to improve engagement	..
Government	.NAO, 2006	Conflates senior level engagement and ‘intelligent client’.	thus implying the multi-headedness of the client
Government	.NAO, 2006	Engagement and collaborative relationships are referred to as if synonyms	..
Practitioner	.Czerniawska, 2006	.Argues that extent of engagement between clients and consultants determines the success of consulting projects but doesn’t define engagement.	..
Practitioner	Block, 2000	.Devotes a whole chapter to the term & recommends Axelrod	..
Practitioner	Axelrod, 2007	.Identifies that participation in the sense of compliance is not enough to be involved	.He distinguishes the term as requiring involvement.
Practitioner	.Axelrod, 2006 .	.Axelrod identifies an engagement gap between those who have initiated a project for change and everyone else. An engagement gap can widen between the groups. An ecumenical i.e. inclusive and collective approach, to change theory will narrow that gap.	.Follow up in project research
Academic	.Barki, 1989	.defined and examined user participation	..
Academic	.Barki, 1994 Hartwick, 1994	examined user participation and user involvement	..
Academic	Barki, 1989	.Barki and Hartwick defined user involvement as a psychological state when the user considers a system to be both important and personally relevant	..
Academic	.Hartwick, 1994	Hartwick and Barki talk about involvement “overall responsibility is the most important antecedent of user involvement and attitude toward the system”	..
Academic	Peled, 2001	Peled recommends that management develop interest in technological projects.	..
Academic	Biehl, 2007	.found that top management involvement and real commitment was a success factor in IS project development on big and complex projects	.Biehl refers to commitment as if synonymous with involvement but doesn’t define involvement
Academic	.Fincham, 2002 & 1999	.Fincham refers to engagement in and he uses it in a political context with reference to power games.	Not useful at the moment
Academic	Handley, 2007	.They note a differentiation between participation & engagement: “What seems to be required is a way of differentiating between participation and what Wenger calls ‘mere engagement in practice’ (Wenger, 1998: 75). A key assumption here seems to be that participation involves ‘hearts and minds’”.	This could be a useful section to work from.

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Axelrod, R. H. (2001) 'Why Change Management Needs Changing', Reflections, 2 (3), pp. 46-57. 732
Axelrod, R. H. (2007) 'How to Get Others Involved', Harvard Management Update, 12 (8), pp. 2-2. 743
Axelrod, R. H., Axelrod, E., Jacobs, R. W. and Beedon, J. (2006) 'Beat the Odds and Succeed in Organizational Change', Consulting to Management - C2M, 17 (2), pp. 6-9. 744
Barki, H. and Hartwick, J. (1989) 'Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement', MIS Quarterly, 13 (1), pp. 53-63. 757
Barki, H. and Hartwick, J. (1994) 'Measuring User Participation, User Involvement, and User Attitude', MIS Quarterly, 18 (1), pp. 59-82. 746
Biehl, M. (2007) 'SUCCESS FACTORS for Implementing Global Information Systems', Communications of the ACM, 50 (1), pp. 53-58. 700
Block, P. (2000) Flawless Consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, (2 Edn), Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer. 27
Czerniawska, F. (2006). Ensuring sustainable value from consultants. 49
Fincham, R. (1999) 'THE CONSULTANT-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE', Journal of Management Studies, 36 (3), pp. 335-351. 522
Fincham, R. (2002) 'The Agent's Agent', International Studies of Management & Organization, 32 (4), pp. 67-86. 500
Handley, K., Clark, T., Fincham, R. and Sturdy, A. (2007) 'Researching Situated Learning', Management Learning, 38 (2), pp. 173-191. 458
Hartwick, J. and Barki, H. (1994) 'Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use', Management Science, 40 (4), pp. 440-465. 749
NAO (2006a) Central Government's use of consultants Vol. HC 128 Session 2006-2007 National Audit Office. 577
NAO (2006b) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment National Audit Office. 109
NAO (2006c) Delivering successful IT-enabled business change Vol. HC 33-1 National Audit Office. 682
NAO (2006d) Good governance: Measuring Success Through Collaborative Working Relationships HMSO. 818<

Concise writing

Had a supervisory today. Supervisor #1 commented that you could see I had a mathematical background because I was too concise!

I'd given them about 4000 words to read on accountability, institutionalism and competing logics and also on client-consultant relationships. Too much! Too curt! Although I was particularly interested in Peled's paper that looked at the pyramid of bureaucrat-consultant-outsourcer, I had written only a couple of sentences on it.

Successful supervision - I've got a steer towards a general question about the evaluation of effective use of consultants in the public sector, and want to look especially at IT consultants because that's the biggest sector that UK consultants work in. It also fits in with an interview I have next week with the VP of a big IT company.

Practised interviews this afternoon in the participatory video workshop.

Need to practise less concise writing...

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Peled, D. A. 2001. Outsourcing and Political Power: Bureaucrats, Consultants, Vendors and Public Information Technology. Public Personnel Management, 30(4): 495.

Research questions

I'm going to have to start identifying research questions from my literature search. May be one from the contracts paper that I mentioned a few weeks ago, but also may be this article by Peled will raise useful questions.

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Peled, D. A. 2001. Outsourcing and Political Power: Bureaucrats, Consultants, Vendors and Public Information Technology. Public Personnel Management, 30(4): 495.