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Businesses have bought external advice since businesses began - but when it develops into an addiction it's time to wean the company off over-reliance on consultants.

Buying advice seems simple. You need advice, I tell you what you don’t know and you pay for my expertise. It's an arms-length relationship, called on when you need it.

Most consultancy is a bit more complex and consultancy buyers may complain of being taken over, with one director describing consultants as 'chest-bursting aliens'.

Consulting firms want to maximise profit and selling more business to the same client, or new clients, is the way to do it - delivering more consulting services and enhancing market share.

Fine up to a point, but do consultants sell more than the client needs or can cope with? Do consultants sometimes creat relationships where clients become increasingly dependent?

The dependency spiral

As a consultant it's in my financial interests to sell you more. I can do this by meeting your needs….and possibly increasing them…to sell you even more (and therefore increase my profit).

While I'm in your organisation other people might feel I can be of benefit to them too – and so I can offer support to even more people.

As a client you want to do things well – and as an expert I can explain how, which helps you improve your skills and knowledge.

Then you become overloaded – and my support becomes ‘business as usual’.

Together we create a spiral of dependency.

You become less confident as we jointly create a changed situation in which you move further away from your knowledge base.

You now need consultants to operate at this new level of ‘business as usual’. You are dependent.

What to do?

A consultant’s energy gives you a high; a consultant’s advice makes you feel more confident; consultants give you extra headroom to do more.

Occasional uppers are fine – we all need that bit of caffeine. But once you find life difficult without a consultant's help there is a dependency problem.

As with all dependency – first acknowledge the problem, and the dependency.

• Who is affected?
• What consultancy is being provided?
• How value adding is it?
• Can we do this ourselves?
• Should we do this ourselves?

Unhooking from consultancy dependency is hard – as difficult as any drug dependency.

Kicking the habit

First acknowledge the scope of the dependency – it may be bigger than you think, where budgets and sign-off authorities are scattered.

Managers may make unwise purchasing decisions but purchasing functions brought in to sort out the problem don't always help.

Managers should review consultancy at the level it is purchased:

Q. Who uses which consultants and how long has this been going on? (Indicates level of dependency)

Q. How are consultants purchased? (Indicates good or bad purchasing practice)

Q. How are consultants reviewed? (Indicates good or bad deliverables management)

It's difficult to argue against having a good grip on what your consultants are doing but experience suggests clients' consultant management is often weak.

Deliverables are poorly defined and expectations implicit. An overall picture of how consultants are managed across a business is rarely viewed in its entirety.

Businesses recognising an over-spend often demand: 'No more consultants'. But putting the brakes on is a desperate measure creating instability while the edict runs its course.

This action is a blunt instrument where ‘babies’ go out with ‘bath water’.

In cases of dependency, it's better to review consultant activity, consider its value and manage an exit, or de-scope the intervention.

January 2006

Unhooking from consultancy dependency is hard - as difficult as any drug dependency.