Dissertation nearly there

I've been checking my work against the marking scheme. I reckon it passes, but I can't tell the quality of the pass; I don't think it's a distinction. How can you assess yourself against clearness? What is clear to me has not been clear to my supervisors. The marking scheme for a band that is 84-70% wants

"clear articulation of research questions that are derived from a critical review of the literature."

I can find problems with that - what's "clear"? What's "critical"? and have my questions come from the literature? Do I show that they have, or do they seem to come from the top of my head!

Restructuring

I've reordered material from the draft dissertation so that the analysis covers roles and application of agency theory to the data. That takes out loads of material from the chapter that has to be called interpretation. What's the difference between analysis and interpretation?

I think the analysis bits are where I've applied ideas from Miles and Huberman, used codes, rich picture (Checkland) and drawn up a role-ordered matrix.

That's quite helpful because it shows where the roles match Schein's concepts of client types. Then I put that analysis on to my agency theory diagram so I can see the chain of links, and back stitch links between various accountors.

The interpretation bit needs a bit more thought. I've linked it from the analysis by occasionally picking up ideas in the analysis and suggesting they are new to this case. For example, the analysis identified incidents of accountability despite that participant saying he/she couldn't think of one or didn't understand the question, so I thought that was unconscious acting of accountability and something to follow up in the interpretation.

Funny how writing helps you think. It seemed to me that that unconscious acting was a reaction to a situation, so the participant demonstrated reactive accountability, and that meant I realised that the other planned accountability was proactive. And that leads me to my last, not yet properly written chapter on findings.

Relooking at the literature

I've gone back over the literature review chapter- it's quite depressing because now I think I don't really have incisive research questions, and am not clear how I get any questions from the review at all. If I haven't set a question, then what is my research answering.

I've rewritten the section on accountability again. And again. My supervisors want a definition, but I'm not sure that a definition is good enough, because that makes it sound like you can get a grip on accountability but it's too nebulous to grip.

I've talked about Sinclair's discourses of accountability, and Bovens analysis of accountability in the public sector and Siegel-Jacobs and Yates research comparing outcome and procedural accountability seems important. Agency theory matters and I've drawn diagrams to show how I'm applying it to multiple accountors and accountees.





And that moves me on nicely to discussing consultants, clients and relationships.

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Bovens, M. 2005 Public Accountability in The Oxford Handbook of Public Management, draft, L. Lynne C., Pollitt (eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press
Siegel-Jacobs, K and Yates, J.F., (1996). "Effects of Procedural and Outcome Accountability on Judgment Quality" Organizational behavior and human decision processes 65 (1): 1–17.
Sinclair, A., 1995, The Chameleon of Accountability: forms and discourses, Accounting, Organizations and society 20(2/3.): 219-237

What do you do when..?

Suppose the consultant advises something, and it's bad advice. Who's responsible? The consultant for giving bad advice? Well, he won't get more work from that company. But it's not a company, it's a public service and it's public money that's been spent to get that bad advice. So why did someone in the service get bad advice? Through bad management. There are ways of preventing the situation arising:

• Write a brief,
  
• Get the contract right.
  
• Require progress reports
  
• Withhold payment.

Look at briefs. This is what the consultant said:

“Because you need to be very clear what does the client want actually get out of this, because you’ll never be able to give them the right recommendations if you have a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation of what their goals are.”

Get the contract right. Look at contracts:

"So there are contractual agreements between the council and the consultancy and there are certain agreed outputs."

Progress reports warn the managers before it goes wrong.

And if it still goes wrong, look at withholding payment:

“I can think of one, where one of our IT contracts to implement an upgrade to a social services system where the consultants failed to deliver what we wanted, and we got into a contractual negotiation where we withheld a considerable sum of payment.”

If the project gets to the stage where there’s a contractual negotiation and withholding of money, then the process has gone a long way down the wrong road. But who is ultimately responsible?
Some say one thing:

“The person that decides that they should be brought in and sets the brief”

Others look at something wider:

“I think the county needs to be more transparent to its council taxpayers, in terms of the use that is made of consultants.”

Some say the public elected leader of the council.

So it looks as if there is some sort of process to prevent and to deal with bad consultancy advice, and for the lines of public accountability that must answer for that poor advice.

The story

The case study story is about a small project in an English county council where consultants were brought in to develop an approach to a county council service.

For those who don't know, county councils are run by the public servants and the elected members or councils represent the electorate. County councils provide services such as

• education including schools and art galleries,


• care services such as adoption, social services and may be care homes,


• development services such as waste disposal,


• community services such as parks or libraries,


• resources such as estate management, encampments, transport and roads.

The basic brief was to consider the future of the service but was driven by budget problems.

The consultants visited all the branches of the service, listened to the service assistants and then produced an internal report. The operations managers incorporated the consultants’ advice into a long technical document that became the county council’s report. Some components of the report had repercussions, for instance one component advised closing eight branches, which would save over £200,000.

The elected members took the review to public consultation. People objected to losing the service and they found a totally different approach to the way those branches were run and consequently kept five of them.

The consultants’ recommendations were not totally implemented; the political process changed the outcome.

Last supervision meeting

Having spent an intense hour discussing my draft dissertation with my supervisors. As always, they've read my ramblings and courteously and logically point out the errors and lacunas of my writings. But this is the last formal submission so is the last time they get to comment on my work and my last chance for advice. I've got six weeks to ruin it by myself. It has to be handed in 10th September. The supervisors don't mark it, but some third party who knows nothing about it.

However, S#1 volunteered to take a look at it when he gets back from holiday, and has even arranged to meet to discuss it, just one week before it is due in. :) S#2 might have time to comment on an electronic copy, but is back from a longer holiday even later than S#1.

I've allowed husband to book us a trip away after submitting the dissertation, but then today they started talking about the viva. Viva! When? Talk to people about it? Oh dear, not another interview. But it's only with two people not a whole board of them and I suppose I might manage.

Asymmetry of information

Agency theory talks about asymmetry of information. The principal and agent have different information and different information needs. That's relevant to explaining a perspective of this project. One person saw that it 'petered out' rather than coming to a clear conclusion. At the final stage, operation managers were able to continue to call the consultants for advice, who therefore billed for extra days. If the principal /Operations Manager perceived a need for information & lacked confidence in own ability to carry on and implement the changes, but perceived the consultant / agent had that information, then contact was continued, and the billing.

Keil, Mann and Rai discuss this escalation in their paper on why software projects escalate [1]; I think it is irrelevant whether or not the project is a software one. There seems to be a lot of research on software projects and at least some of it must be transferable to non-software projects. Keil et al's quantitative study found that two constructs associated with agency theory, were associated with projects that could be predicted to escalate. The concepts are:

• goal incongruency


• information asymmetry

Goal incongruency is where there is potential conflict between the principal and the agent, such as the agent acting for his own best interests rather than that of the principal.

Information asymmetry is where
"the agent is assumed to have private information to which the principal cannot costlessly gain access." Baiman[2]

Implications for good practice were the importance of good communication and monitoring of projects to avoid information asymmetry. They also suggested management should implement early warning systems to detect escalation.

Good communication is something the participants have mentioned in my case study – they require transparency. A combination of monitoring mechanisms and good communication seem to have made this project successful from the perspective of most of the participants.

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[1]Mark Keil; Joan Mann; Arun Rai, Why Software Projects Escalate: An Empirical Analysis and Test of Four Theoretical Models, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4. (Dec., 2000), pp. 631-664. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0276-7783%28200012%2924%3A4%3C631%3AWSPEAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2
[2]Stanley Baiman, AGENCY RESEARCH IN MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING: A SECOND LOOK, Accounting Organizations and Society Vol 15.No 4 p.p . 341-371.1 990.

Finding gaps

Gaps so far:

1. mechanisms of accountability missing towards the end of a project
2. potential lack of brief & timescales
3. lines of accountability that might involve an intermediate client
4. lines of accountability missed in a complex project than involves more than one service, (not in this project). Where a project involves two services then someone has to realise and communicate its existence to both of the relevant elected members.

Points of view

I have five different people, all talking about the same project.

They seem to have overlaps of their perspectives of accountability, but also there are two different views. One is absolutely sure accountability existed all the way through this project and can immediately indicate lines and mechanisms of accountability. Another sees gaps. How do I reconcile these two views? I suspect that they are both right; that there was accountability but that accountability was only clear for the first phases of the project and not in later parts.

Agency theory suggests that information asymmetry between agent and principal means the principal wants information that the agent possesses. So if there is a public-sector manager who doesn't yet feel confident that she/ he knows what he /she wants to know, then the temptation to prolong the contract must exist.

Interviewing

I have this wonderful digital audio recorder that the department has lent me to do my interviewing. It's an Olympus DM-10 and apparently costs a small fortune. At Amazon, it's nearly £200, no, £300. But it records well over the speaker phone - I haven't got to meet any of my interviewees yet. It's small and fits into my hand and it's unobtrusive. I like it so much that I might get myself one. I suppose I could justify it if I am going on to do the doctorate and I do interviews again. And it would also be useful for one of my hobbies- recording what my older relatives say about family history. I'm convincing myself...

Don't shoot the advisor

In the August copy of Management Today, Richard Reeves wrote this. He argues that it's up to the public-sector officials to make sure consultants' advice is of high quality. There's a balance needed between the cost of permanently hiring or training specialists that the service might need for only a few months, and bringing in the external expertise, but consultancies are profit making businesses, and must make money to survive. I like Reeves metaphor:
"If the public sector is handing out sweets, they can hardly be blamed for the resulting sugar high."
However, he does also accuse civil servants and politicians of deifying those in the private sector, and I don't know what evidence he has for that. It is not what I'm hearing from my interviewees. What I am hearing is that consultants earn their money by:

• providing expertise that is not in-house,
  
• moving organisations that wouldn't otherwise be moved and
  
• saving the organisation more than they cost.

And if the lines and mechanisms of accountability are in place, then there won't be many undeserved sweets.

Draft in

The draft is in, and I await the verdict. Nevertheless, I know there were more additions and refinements, not least the extra perspective from the interview due on Friday. But there was also the feeling that it wouldn't matter if I didn't use quite the right language, or if I experimented with diagrams, which I have done when examining the number of relationships.