Who’d want to be a consultant in 2023?
Consulting Despite the myths and negativity around consulting, it’s a very rewarding profession, and a very useful service if you use it well. (Emma Bemrose/Private Media)
Think about this past financial year — it started with a new government putting consulting and labour hire firms on notice, promising fewer contracts, growing support and discussion around developing internal APS consulting capability, and much focus on the ‘54,000’ members of the external labour force who had to go.
Then it continued with a slow down and general reluctance to engage consulting services, changing delegation levels for consulting procurements so that in some cases a Band 2 signature was required for relatively small pieces of work, slowing down procurement processes and the work flowing through to the sector — and then it just got worse with the PwC debacle and a single negative paintbrush across all consulting services.
The trouble with some of the narrative — and the impact this has had on consulting — is in the language.
First of all, of the 54,000 contractors and consultants engaged by the APS, 34,000 were engaged by the Department of Defence, and of those, only 370 were consultants.
In fact according to The Australian Government’s report on the Audit of Employment, of the 53,911 external labour force that everyone was up in arms over, only 954 (yes, 1.8%) were consultants.
Further to this, 28,000 (52%) were outsourced service providers, the people who deliver services such as cleaning, security, and facilities management — not currently core APS jobs. That leaves 18,000 contractors and almost 7,000 labour hire.
Contractors are the people that are giving us all a bad name — and you all know who they are. By definition, they are the ‘specialised skills’ that are performed under direct supervision, but in reality, they are often the people who have been contracting long term, performing roles that could otherwise be done long term by the APS, or at least have the skills transferred to the APS to avoid the multiple-year contracts we all hear about.
You can’t really blame contractors personally for performing the roles or taking the money, the APS and government have full control over this.
Labour hire personnel bring the ‘generalised skills’ to work in service delivery, ICT and digital solutions and portfolio, program and project management job families.
So despite the 54,000 number bandied around — consultants comprise 1.8% of that total, and that doesn’t seem unreasonable if you know how to get the value you need from their services.
According to Austender:
“consultancy contracts represent a low proportion of government procurement contracts overall …. Consultants deliver value for money when the need for additional support is temporary, project-specific, or is highly specialised in nature.”
Looking at it from a procurement rather than people perspective, according to Austender’s reporting on consultancy contracts, of the 59,346 contracts published in the 2022-23 financial year, 3.86% of these were for consultancy services.
In dollar terms, of the $57.25 billion contracts published, 0.71% ($405.2 million) were published as consultancy. Less than 1%. I’m not sure that’s a great reason for all the noise around consulting expenditure.
So if I can debunk the myth that consultants are taking APS jobs — which I hope I have done above — then how do I tackle the herd of conflicted elephants running rampant, with PwC leading the charge?
PwC is in the headlines now and for good reason, but there are many examples across the board of astonishingly bad and well-publicised debacles based on conflicts of interest by the major global consulting firms. Right now, PwC seems to be the gift that keeps on giving for an Australian government seeking to reduce reliance on consulting services.
So with this dark shadow cast over the consulting profession, are we all just a bit dodgy?
I refer to the Department of Finance’s Management Advisory Services Panel, commonly known as consultancies, that lists 554 approved suppliers across financial, corporate and commercial categories.
Of these, 340 are small to medium enterprises – small business owners – many of whom left the big end of town because it wasn’t working for them, to set up their own businesses and to work in a way that they felt more comfortable with.
We belong to a large informal network of small businesses, many of us with up to 20 employees, so we’re large enough to take on some serious work across a breadth of skills and experience, but not really large enough to get into conflict of interest trouble, or to have incentives that drive undesirable or illegal behaviours.
So no, we’re not all a bit dodgy. Most of us are trying to do good work, our best work, in an environment that is currently a little hostile.
According to the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, as reported in SmartCompany, small businesses contribute half a trillion dollars — one-third of GDP — to the economy, and the report goes on to note that it’s not always easy. Add a bit of headwind for the consulting sector and you’ll get a sense that the smaller end of town is looking forward to a shift in perception in the coming financial year.
So with all that in mind, and back to my initial question — who would want to be a consultant in 2023? I’ll respond with a clear yes, me, I would.
A few hours ago I finished an engagement with an agency that does really important work for some of Australia’s most vulnerable people. We started working with them in February, just over four months ago, when they found themselves full of good intentions, as busy as ever trying to make a positive difference. What they needed was a national, connected approach, refreshed commitment to a very clear purpose, strategy and plan and a different understanding of what the agency needed in terms of approach and a mindset shift from process to outcomes.
None of this was beyond their reach, but sometimes when you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, and harder still to cut a way through.
For three months we worked with the team to develop a strategy they could all support, consolidated regional teams into a national model to enable more consistent ways of working and workload management; shifted mindsets to focus more on risk and outcomes, and set up the program management, communication and process structures they needed to sustain the changes. We then spent the last month consolidating, continuing to upskill and handing responsibilities over to the team. During my last hour with them earlier today, I observed them running their own Transformation Program Board meeting and felt happily redundant.
They’d taken the step they needed to, they’d built new skills, established a more strategic and integrated approach to achieving what they needed to achieve, and they didn’t need us anymore.
So despite the myths and negativity around consulting at the moment, it’s a very rewarding profession, and a very useful service if you use it well.
