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.