It would be interesting to see if these consultants actually worked in the departments they are consulting on before they became self employed. Scottish Enterprise has a bad record on this.

Its jobs for the boys I'm afraid.

Aye ,even joke mc numpty tried and failed to get his acolytes
to chip in so as he could keep his so called advisors .
what A plonker. they said fcuk joke ,not gettin any of my freee money

-- little proof that they provide value for money

even less indication that they do anything at all.

And they're billing us Scots at ~ £6 per second?

Thon Yookey is long past its sell by date.

Isn't this the nub of New Labour's profligacy? Where a government, run from No. 10, by lawyers and accountants, who don't trust their in-house experts to give them the answers they want to hear?The automatic 'spin' off of this agenda is stupidity and corruption on a massive scale.

Having effectively a two thousand eight hundred million slush fund, produces things like Government I.T. systems that don't seem able to tell what day it is, which in turn infects DEFRA, NHS, The Home Office.. and everything else..like the Dome and the Scottish Parliament building, all huge (and still glowing) financial scandals brushed under the carpet.

Come back Sir Humphrey, all is forgiven!

Mrs.T

Hiring consultants has become an epidemic with New Labour. Hire someone to tell you what you already know and then dress it up as an independent review that validates your own opinion. Spin gone mad. Value for money - definitely not. Just look at the Trams fiasco, millions spent on basically nothing. Bliar promised to get rid of quangos when he came to power, he has done the exact opposite. Stop this out of control state spending now - no wonder we can't pay nurses a living wage or get enough policemen onto the streets. Too many pen pushers from McKinsey working on strategy papers for the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Aye it's easy to spend money when it isn't yours.
New Labour mastered this from around day 1.
Soon they will be history.

I used to work for Deloitte, and know for a fact that they make a fortune from Management Consultancy work that isn't required.

I once carried out some work at Yorkhill hospital for them. When I arrived to do the work, it seemed someone else from Deloitte had already been there to do similar work 2 months beforehand.

The NHS are at fault here for not being able to control what consultancy work happens and when. Deloitte where at fault for selling the same piece of work twice i.e. playing to the weaknesses of the NHS.

The actual work carried out was in Information Security and the fact that they have an Information Security Officer made the point of the work being done twice even more puzzling, and I stress at this point it wasn't an audit.

The cost of the work was £10,000 for 5 days. Of this the client was charged £4,000 for the Deloitte partner to sign it off - even though the conclusive report was not in anyway legally binding.

Finally, I couldn't see any "value added" benefit from doing the work as the advice given was obvious especially to the Information Security Officer at Yorkhill.

If anything, working at Deloitte opened my eyes to the mafia style cons that this company can pull, and just what large summs of money they make on work that is money for old rope.

When it comes to integrity Deloitte do not know the meaning.

Aye,

all part of the union dividend.

'consultancy' I would describe as not so much a science as more of an art form...

they speak a confusing, different language (its all smoke and mirrors), and very rarely contribute much to anything in my experience (local government), whilst at the same time charging fee levels that are unbelievably high.

I know we've called AM2 everything under the sun, but I would bet my mortgage he has at least once, carried out work as a consultant to some government project or another. He fits the mould perfectly.

#4
And I forgot the worst bit of stupidity..AND this is a pet idea of Broon! P.F.I.s

Putting capital costs into the public domain just so that it doesn't appear on the government's book as 'an expense'. Which is a joke when the Government print the bloody money. AAAAH!!
Mrs.T

When I worked for a quango, a management consultant said we needed a web site for a certain project, and sourced a marketing firm which offered to do it for £2,000. As I am a trained web designer myself, I objected to this and went ahead and did a better web site myself at cost - £60.

Naturally, this made me the bad guy. From then on management gave me the look of death, and indeed, I was out of the quango in a few months. The thought that I'd questioned the motivations and even the need for the consultant was blasphemy. All this for using the skills the company had in-house to save £1,940 in public funds.

This will be the consultants that advised Labour on how to spin out the Olympics and to show how great the union is and how great Blair is..
Yep a complete waste of money!

#11 HMB ......

That I'm afraid is a familiar story. You broke the rules by showing some initiative!

Why when we have one of the largest public sectors in the World we then we require to bring in outside consultants on a daily basis is baffling.

Time to cut back the public sector, introduce fixed term contracts and performance monitoring, look at the introduction of better IT that is more efficent, does need inflation busting pensions and high salaries.

Reduce taxation from the savings achieved and let real growth in the economy end poverty in Scotland.

How we can have had the invention of computers and still end up with even more thousands of public sector workers is completely unbelievable.

SOUNDS LIKE A PARTY POLITICAL ELECTION BROADCAST FOR NEW LABOUR, HOPE THE PEOPLE OF SCOTLAND ARE LISTENING

Governments and NDPBs LOVE consultants! I can't remember how many times I've been at a conference and heard the immortal words " .. a consultation is in progress"!!

How do consultants actually become consultants, and couldn't the governmental bodies find this out and just do it themselves??

13, it gets better - after I was asked to leave, they brought in yet another consultant to tear apart all the work I'd ever done for the quango. Much to the quango's annoyance, she could find nothing wrong with any of it. So naturally, they stopped working with her consultancy firm, as she wasn't telling them what they wanted to hear.

Naturally, this quango works in economic development and "social inclusion"...

Wow!!

Someone can divide 2,000,000,000 by 31,536,000!!!

...so that it appears more sensational.

This looks like anger over meaninglessly presented satistics once again.

# 17

Funnily enough, when I started asking questions regarding the general approach Deloitte took, I wasn't long for the exit.

I asked questions to get an understanding of my new job - to be told "don't question the methodology"

Management Consultancy is basically a sales game. You have to be a good salesman, you have to promise the earth, you have to make it sound good and you have to tell the client what they want to hear - just make sure its not legally binding.

When I was at Deloitte I was concerned by the lack of knowledge of in depth Information Security - hence the general approach they took. When I started using my real life experience from the Financial Services industry they seemed at a loss to understand what I was talking about. I suppose they best way to become a Management Consultant is to keep this general - don't be specific as you may get found out.

The sad part is the average salary of a Deloitte partner is £650,000 per annum, and large portion of their work comes from the public sector.

As someone who has made a living doing the same work, I shouldnt complain but lets face it middle and senior people want to have a referred consultant to lay the blame at their door if and when things dont work out. Its the oldest game going and a good one to fall back on if you need to make a quid.

But the other side to the coin makes you think what could be done for the 90,000 kids living in poverty with the 2.8 billion. Or what could be done by Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Northern England if it was shared out between them to help develope their run down communities. I suppose it is just another justification for the breakup of the UK. Westminster is a monolith of useless people out of touch with the UK people. Just think if they scrapped Trident the country could end the national housing shortage as quick as they could build the homes, and still have 20 billion to put away for a rainy day. Oh sorry then they could not be an international player interfearing in other countries business. Just think how bored the old Tony or Gordon would be if all they had to work at was bloody boring things like poverty, the Drug problem, improving Education and Health Care for all, Helping Africa with its many many problems with Infrastructures that we take for granted but pay through the nose for. They could send Engineers, Road Builders and Doctors/Nurses but they wouldnt be allowed to send Rockets, Missiles, Landmines or Rifles etc. No that would be too simple, they would have to get consultants in to formulate a set of recommendations in case they did a labour party and screwed it up.

HMB you mean you actually dared to think for yourself? No wonder you didn't last long!

Must have been pretty galling though having to work alongside such narrowminded people.

This doesn't surprise me, the government haemorrage money, taxpayers money, at an alarming rate that would kill a business within days if it acted so stupidly.

#19 we should go into business together.

#20 the sad thing is, when you see headlines about the Scottish Executive pouring X million into deprivation or economic development or whatever, that means x million going to consultants and management, not going to the source of the issues. Why bother actually tackling problems when you can fly in a consultant from the US to cover a wall in post-it notes while soliciting "keywords" for the quango's "vision statement".

If you fix and stop our problems, you also stop the gravy train for consultants and public sector management. So the problems are kept alive by any means necessary.

And sadly, the complete lack of investigative journalism and objective, questioning reportage in this country lets it happen every day. If a Scottish quango is flying in someone from America to teach employees how to hug, QUESTION IT, don't report it as a happy human interest story!