Asking how

How is a difficult question to answer. Explaining how is harder than answering what or why or who questions. You can ask people

What did you do?

and they might tell you what they think they did or what they want you to think they did:

• they organised
• I asked
• they wrote
• he interviewed
• they reported
• they met, talked
• I shared this document
• they offered us a deal
  
• she nipped it in the bud
• they emailed
• they asked
• she phoned
• we saved this money
  
• they formed relationships at n levels
  
• they painted or stated or communicated a vision
• they got distracted or called away
• they've worked with organisations
• they've become disillusioned
• I've helped people learn or understand
• they've laid out a strategy
• they've tested an idea
• they changed
• they get heated
• they promised they could deliver
• they pulled the wool over our eyes
• we ended up with a partner
• we played through the options
• he tried to explain, tried to talk, tried to deal
  
• they got threatened by the changes
• she got involved in the detail
• they responded to issues
  

But ask

How did you do it?

And they tell you that they did it:

• confidently
• carefully
• assertively
• cost effectively

or even that they understood strategically or they struggled to understand strategically. I still don't know how they engaged.

But they don't tell you that; they tell you what. They answer with what, so you have to word your questions to elicit 'hows', how your interviewee did it and how your interviewee perceived others doing it. So it's a construction of a construction that I'm reconstructing, and I don't know that what I eventually construct will have any validity at all.

I'm not sure I've got any answer to my question.

Methodology

Something's bugging me. It's how to match the research questions to the answers I got to my interview questions. But my interview questions were framed round the Nahapiet & Ghoshal paper, not around my research questions.

I happened to mention this niggle to my third party monitor. She asked questions about my approach, the methodology I'm using, or my research strategy for making sense of the data in order to work out where I am. She suggests I write the methodology chapter now, as a story of how I done it. She knows I'm interested in story telling and narrative analysis and suggested some reading, including looking at the methodology chapters of recent PhDs, especially from Lancaster where they stress methodology.

It was a really helpful discussion - beyond what a third party monitor's brief might be - and I'm grateful for the time and suggestions.

---

Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842
PS. The bug in the photo is a wood-louse spider.

Advice

I've had feedback from the ethics chap. He points out that

1. my supervisors have to endorse the ethics application
2. the research question might need to be "rather more focused and explicit"

So oh yeuch! Supervisors aren't around for weeks, (see the PhD comic on elusive supervisors) and ethics applications take perhaps a month to get through, and I hoped to know enough about what I was doing by September to start on a pilot project.

And yeah! I'm writing something now so that I can get this darned research question focused and explicit.

Back to the writing desk!

Mini-viva

The mini-viva happened. It was okay. They didn't rubbish my research question, nor tell me my literature review was pants, nor that the scope was impossibly big. But they did query what I meant by social constructionism and told me that I was defining it in terms of itself. Now I come to think of it, attempting to define something is being positivist, isn't it? So the concept of social constructionism must be constructed.

They also pointed out that I'd mentioned power, but all but dismissed it, when it is very important in engaging with people. They're right. But I thought and wrote about power months ago, then decided it wasn't important enough to make a big thing of it in the viva.

Probation looms

By the end of June I must submit a project report that includes:

• a viable research question
• a critical literature review which situates the proposed research
• a research proposal including an outline of proposed method(s) and a critical justification for them
• a work plan for the project.

And then I get a viva.

• I'm beginning to get the research question, something about engaging with consultants in order to get an effective contribution to a project.
• I've read a fair deal around the topic: consultants, clients, public sector including government literature, projects, IT projects, New Public Management, institutionalism, accountability, value engineering and risk. And I've written up on what I've read so my supervisors have some idea of what I've read and absorbed.
• Now I have to put together the research proposal, which I guess is to take case studies from public sector organisations and interview clients. It would be great if I could shadow a senior responsible officer. The critical justification for the method is in the theoretical framework.
• The work plan is not going to get much time from me. I wonder what they mean by it.
  

Management of External Consultants in the Public Sector

What? Consultancy is a growing industry, and its biggest UK market is the public sector. This brings issues of:

• project iteration processes,
• culture and roles of various parties,
• motivations that vary with roles,
• risk aversion,
• separate departments’ resources & experience, and
• good or adverse media.

Why? Government receives variable value from consultancy projects

Research question: How does the public sector manage external consultants?

Preliminary findings: a chain of management exists with official processes such as reviews and reports, but with some missing or weakened links of accountability, e.g. when the consultant doesn’t have to work with the contracting official. See diagram.

Future research: How can improvements in management in the public sector reap value from suppliers?

This is what I am putting together for a poster for a competition for research students. My aim however is also to address public sector workers who might use consultants and could offer me access for my research. So:

1. Does this content work?
2. Some people don't like diagrams, so perhaps I should take it out. What do you think of the diagram?

Public value

What's the problem that causes these issues:

• iteration,
  
• roles,
  
• motivation,
  
• risk,
  
• silos,
  
• media.

The problem is that government gets variable value from the external advice that it receives. The corollary is that it is accountable for maximising this value, then how is that accountability discharged? Can I ultimately come up with recommendations on how to improve that value?

Lines of enquiry
How do we define public value? Perhaps I look at the value that public receives - and trying to increase the value achieved by using external consultants through the lens of accountability
How can improvement in the management of accountability reap value from external consultancy?

Theoretically there's a framework of accountability. The relevant department has a senior responsible owner (SRO) who understands the business, and his role as a leader to exploit IT. The intelligent client is actively engaged, and clear about what wants.

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) gives advice and guidance. I could correlate the value against that advice to find the public value from consultants turning accountability into a positive thing.

Discharging accountability means getting evidence that a programme is being executed appropriately - easy with something like checking the Olympic building site is growing, but you can't see that with management change, or IT implementation.

What kind of regime could a minister or senior official put in place to discharge their accountability for the success of the programme in terms of knowing that it's going to work. How does a minister get reports about big programmes. What's the equivalent of the walkabout?

My 3rd party monitor suggested finding a plan B and doing a pilot study in summer.. I wonder who would let me in.

Writing a proposal

There's the opportunity to present my research to fellow associate lecturers (ALs) in my region. But first I have to write a proposal for the presentation. This has to be an anonymous 200-word abstract giving the title and outline the content of the presentation. So I've taken the abstract from my Masters and tried to rewrite it for the AL audience. Then I emailed it to Dimitra, who has offered writing help. She was absolutely excellent, both in the comments that she emailed back and in the hour and a half she spent discussing my writing with me, pointing out the ambiguities, the points I hadn't made or needed to make clearer, as well as the order in which I made them. The discussion brought to the fore that my original abstract didn't mention the important finding about the difficulties of access, the need for constant negotiation for access, and how that both suggested a reason for lack of empirical evidence of public accountability and implied difficulties for future research.

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.

First supervisory

First supervisory meeting of the PhD is due tomorrow. I need to think in the light of the MRes experience, what to do next:

• is this still the topic I want to pursue?
• what is the research question?
• what further reading do I need to do?

I think it is still what I want to pursue. Accountability is so important - public accountability is especially demanded in a social state that provides care such as the NHS. See for example the outcry over the dirty hospital.

What light does the MRes cast? That there are different ways of accounting for use of consultants depending on what sort of client relationship you have with the consultants, but also what your relationship with the public is, and what sort of job you have. Relationships are complex.

What's the research question? For the MRes, it was about how the client-consultant relationship influenced accountability. But perhaps there's further to go on this question. Perhaps develop the question further to examine types of clients, types of consultants types of relationships and different types of accountability. There's more research to do on just the question as it stands, using other organisations, or a different project in the same organisation.

What further reading do I need to do? But, if I read further, then I might find new questions. What should I read? Do I read quantitative or qualitative papers? Both I think, as both shed light on what research is already done. What areas? Accountability relates to ethics, and to finance. I think it's more ethics that interests me. What else does accountability relate to - psychology, such as personal construct theory? When starting a systematic review of the literature last week, there were questions:

What is the size of the literature?
How do I measure size of literature? There is a body of literature on accountability, a sub division on public accountability. Similarly, there is academic literature on consultants, written either from the consultant’s perspective, or from the client’s.

Are there any cross-disciplinary perspectives that need to be taken into account?
Could be, such as psychology, social science, maths if it gets complex, IT if concentrate on one of the large sectors for consulting. Use economics for agency theory. Perhaps social network theory is relevant.

What are the major issues and debates about the topic?
Issues about client types, about the discourse of accountability, and about the discourses between clients and consultants.

I have a year for the literature review, so there must be a lot of reading.