Management consulting

10.5 Maintenance and control of the new practice

If a new scheme is to survive and yield more in benefits than it costs, it has to be protected against a number of more or less natural hazards. Standards, systems and procedures are as prone to deterioration through wear and tear and neglect as are machines. Like machines, their performance may eventually be reduced to zero.

Maintenance and control should start while the consultant is still with the client organization, and must continue after his or her departure.

Backsliding

A maintenance and control system has to guard against backsliding, which is liable to occur as long as people remember what they used to do before the change. Backsliding is not always reactionary. If a new method breaks down because of problems with a computer system, equipment, supplies, and so on, work can only continue if people do something else. The most natural thing is to revert to the old practice if that is still possible. While the consultant is well advised never to stop anyone using the old method until it can be completely replaced, he or she should also make sure that after the new method has been proved it is impossible to revert to the old one.

The way this is done will depend, as always, on the function of the assignment and the nature of its problem. A few examples are given below.

Paperwork. When a new documentation procedure is installed, the stock of old forms should be destroyed. One official should be made responsible for maintaining stocks of new forms and signing orders for reprints. The purchasing clerk should not pass on orders for printing signed by any other person.

Filing. When a new filing system becomes operational, old files should be closed and their contents inserted in the new files, moved to archives or destroyed. Provisional and parallel filing outside the new system framework is undesirable.

Operating standards. The maintenance of factory work standards requires vigilance. Working to standards must be made easier than working to nonstandards. Any work outside the specification of the product or method should not be feasible using the standard forms and documentation. This is not to say that departures from standard are never allowed, but when they are, they should be made self-evident.

Drawings. In an engineering drawing office it must not be easier to make a new drawing for a part than to find whether an existing part may be used. When a drawing is permanently changed, all old prints should be tracked down and removed. An adequate control system would prevent unauthorized prints being in circulation at any time.

All these measures are, of course, preventive. In their absence, the alternative is often not a cure but a temporary expedient with a strong likelihood of a recurrence of the problem.

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Implementation

Backsliding problems have to be faced in any firm. When General Electric (GE) decided to start applying Internet technology for its commercial operations on a large scale, “the greatest hurdle was not technology but culture. Sales staff, worried that they might be destroying their jobs, had to be offered bonuses for helping customers to use GE websites to order. Managers had to watch carefully for reprobate employees using parallel paths (the telephone, for instance, or a walk to a store) to order supplies or arrange travel. Some offices even closed their mail rooms for all but one day a week (and that only for the incorrigible legal department) to stop employees from using regular post. Others locked their printer rooms except for occasional days when bosses would station themselves at the door and demand from those who came through an explanation for their sad inability to shake old paper habits”.5

Control procedures

A system of control does not necessarily stop at maintenance in the narrow sense of keeping a scheme in the same state. After a time, any piece of reorganization will begin to suffer from old age, if nothing else. Other changing influences may render it less and less appropriate; the objective for which it was designed may no longer be there. Without a means of control, opportunities to modify and develop in line with changing circumstances may be lost.

It is, however, as easy to overdo control for its own sake as it is to become fascinated by any other technique. The consultant needs only to identify the key points at which significant departures will show up and choose the times at which they are to be checked. It is unnecessary to check everything every day: the criterion is usually how long it would take for anything serious to happen if it were not checked. More frequent checks are needed immediately after a change than later on, when stability at a new level has been reached.

In financial areas, checks are part of budgetary control and made as often as the sensitivity of the situation demands. Labour performance checks may be built into weekly payroll/production analyses. Inventory controls may be in accordance with the main categories of stores.

Business companies accept the annual audit of their books as a matter of course, but may forget that a periodic internal audit of their organization and administrative methods is equally necessary. Apart from those detailed safeguards already mentioned, a periodic audit may be the only way of checking the whole system. Only an audit may reveal whether the total objectives are still being met, or are even still the same. Failure to make such a check allows the passage of time to erode the good work and its benefits.

Staff turnover is a common source of danger. If new staff members are not adequately briefed, they have little option but to act as they think fit. They may pursue surprisingly different objectives and exhibit different work habits. The number of shortcomings that the consultant has met in the client organization may be an indicator of habitual neglect. If the client’s basic attitudes to controls does not change, the consultant’s work may get no better treatment.

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Management consulting

Further improvements

Conversely, it would be unrealistic and totally wrong to assume that the implementation of the consultant’s proposals will make the client’s business perfect and that for a long time no further changes will be required. Improvements may be suggested by the managers, specialists and workers involved in a new scheme, by customers, by the consultant personally or by other professionals working for the same client. Improvements may become possible and necessary due to developments in information technology and other changes that could not be fully considered in the course of the current assignment. Any such improvements may be suggested and become necessary surprisingly soon, much sooner than the consultant imagined when submitting the new scheme to the client.

There will be improvements that can be easily accepted and introduced during the implementation phase. Other improvements will not fit the scheme that has been chosen, but it will be useful to record them and keep them in mind for the future. Remember the “solution-after-next” principle discussed in Chapter 9. There is no point in aiming to propose and implement definitive and closed solutions to clients’ problems when we know only too well that change is the only constant of our times and that better solutions will become both feasible and necessary in the future.

1In the latter event it has to be remembered that suppliers of such systems have a vested interest in selling stationery and that standard packages may not fit the given situation very well.

2S. W. Gellerman: Management by motivation (New York, American Management Association, 1969).

3D. C. McClelland and D. G. Winter: Motivating economic achievement (New York, The Free Press, 1969).

4G. W. Miller: “The magic number seven, plus or minus two”, in Psychological Review, Vol. 63, No. 2, Mar. 1956.

5“While Welch waited”, in The Economist, 19 May 2001, pp. 85–86.

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Termination is the fifth and final phase of the consulting process. Every assignment or project has to be brought to an end once its purpose has been achieved and the consultant’s help is no longer needed.

It is not enough to execute the assignment in a professional manner. The disengagement also has to be fully professional: its timing and form have to be properly chosen and all commitments settled to the mutual satisfaction of the client and the consultant.

The consultant has primary responsibility for suggesting at what point and in what way he or she would withdraw from the client organization. He or she should bear in mind that the client may feel uncertain about the best moment to terminate the project, in particular if the consultant’s presence has clearly contributed to important improvements and the client has become used to seeking advice on important items. The client may feel more secure if the consultant continues to be available to help with any new problems that may arise. This, however, could make the client excessively dependent on the consultant.

Termination applies to two equally important aspects of the consulting process: the job for which the consultant was brought in, and the consultant– client relationship.

First, the consultant’s withdrawal means that the job in which he or she has participated:

●has been completed; or

●will be discontinued; or

●will be pursued, but without further help from the consultant.

In deciding to terminate the assignment, the consultant and the client should be clear which of these three applies in their particular case. There should be no ambiguity about this. It is of no benefit to anybody if the consultant is convinced of having done a good job while the client is waiting only for the consultant’s departure in order to stop the project. Thus the consultant and the client should

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