Costing Blair's managerialism

Here's a marvellous article by Bryan Appleyard on how management consultants have ripped off the tax-payer. The conclusion:

The whole thing has simply been the result of a collective delusion: that there are quasi-scientific, objective ways of managing human affairs that transcend all considerations of culture, ethos and environment. Consultants sold this lie, government bought it, and we’re paying for it.

Here's the book the piece draws upon. Another book criticizing New Labour's managerialism will be published in the spring.

Comments

[dearieme]

Hold on, I'm considering retiring and setting up as a consultant. Don't queer my pitch.

[Bryan Appleyard]

Thanks, Snotty

[james higham]

And as I commented over there - where does get one's expertise from then if you don't listen to the professionals?

[james higham]

Check out Notsaussure on this, Chris. He's given a lengthy reply, running with Bryan's and your idea and answers my naive comment above. You'll have to go to his tiny 'more...' to get the whole story.

[dsquared]

[that there are quasi-scientific, objective ways of managing human affairs that transcend all considerations of culture, ethos and environment]

As I think I've mentioned before, you can go too far with this. The consultancy industry exists for a reason, and most human activities can be organised, Taylorised, standardised and made the subject of science. The massive improvement in living standards in the twentieth century was largely due to this discovery. It is not at all obvious to me that the problem in the public sector was the consultants rather than the fact that their client kept on asking them for solutions that he didn't really want to carry out.

The suggestion that a) it was consultants who were responsible for outsourcing NHS cleaning or b) that MRSA lives on dirty walls, shows the level that we're operating at here; pretty mindless. I'm sure your own book will be better.

[dsquared]

(I mean seriously - Appleyard's entire comment on the field of lean inventory techniques is to say "and that's why the Army didn't have enough body armour in Basra"! Zing! Rimshot! Well that's lean inventory techniques dealt with then! Obviously the entire field is worthless and all of the millions spent in installing inventory management systems have been wasted.

Not only is this quite probably not true - Appleyard doesn't supply any evidence that it was a lean production system that the MoD was using, and since the MoD does not actually manufacture anything, I for one suspect that they weren't (name a single war since Agincourt in which the MoD hasn't had more or less serious quartermastering problems of one kind or another), but it ignores the absolutely demonstrable success of inventory management systems all over the world. The idea that business process re-engineering is "meaningless" just shows that Appleyard hasn't bothered to think for a second here - we all know what a business is, we all know what a process is, and so it shouldn't take much thought to work out that re-engineering one would involve stripping it down to its essentials and seeing if it could be designed better.

There is a decent article here on the government's misuse of consultants, but it appears to have been merged into a bloated and mindless one about consultancy and management science in general. If I were re-engineering Appleyard's article I could downsize it by about a half.

[angry economist]

Well I have worked in public sector and seen lots wasted on management consultants, and a bit of money well spent. Its the wee specialist consultants who do good jobs, whereas the "big 4" have horrendous fees and send around a spotty young oik fresh out of university and knows f-ck all about f-ck all.

But then there's the outsourcing of managed services to the likes of capita too.

In my time, I think sorting out your own mess is better than hiring consultants. If you are going to hire consultants - best if you are an informed consumer, and know what you are buying (so often not the case in govt).

The rule of thumb - hire consultants for 2 reasons only - 1) for the work you don't want to do (its tiresome, boring, repetetive, involves something mucky or unpleasant) or 2) for the work you can't do yourself (too technical, specialist, etc).

[dearieme]

"a spotty young oik fresh out of university and knows f-ck all about f-ck all": careful, the Age Discrimination Stasi will be after you.