This page intentionally left blank

This phrase, at the bottom of an empty page, perfectly sums up my memories of the quality management systems which invaded consulting firms in the mid-1990s. It is stating the obvious; it has no proper verb (no action....); and it treats us as though we’re stupid. Fortunately, they didn’t last long, at least outside some very specific areas of the public sector. The invasion of the initiative-snatchers evaporated, leaving only shelves of decaying ring-binders and process checklists as a sign that it had ever existed.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should have quality circles on consulting projects (although it would be an intriguing idea) or that we should adopt techniques which may now have been shown to be of dubious value. The thing that strikes me about quality management today in other sectors is how much information is generated. Problems can be pinpointed to specific manufacturing processes or to a particular company in the supply chain. Insurance companies know the proportion of claims forms which need to be corrected because of clerical errors. This means that attention can be paid to where things are going wrong, rather than being spread equally across all areas.

Consulting firms have the opposite problem. Most control quality at the level of the individual consultant. Client satisfaction scores feed into the annual appraisal process: those with the best scores will be eligible for promotion; those with the worst can have additional training or ultimately be counselled out. But what this doesn’t show is trends, whether poor performance originates with the individual or the firm. It may be, for instance, that by aggregating and analysing the information you will find that the people you have working on projects in a specific sector are under-performing or that the expertise you have in a particular field is stronger than you realised.

The quality management regimes of the 1990s failed because they didn’t provide meaningful information, but treated all areas of the consulting process with the same degree of seriousness. They tried to prevent problems by standardising inputs. Perhaps there’s now a case for revisiting quality management, but with more than a blank page.

22nd May 2010