Consulting procurement - awkward questions

By Edward Haigh

In November of last year I chaired a round-table discussion about the state of consulting procurement. Around the table (which, for pedants, was actually an elongated oval) were about 12 procurement managers with responsibility for buying consulting in some of the largest private sector organisations in Europe.

In a deliberate attempt to be provocative I opened the discussion by suggesting that the procurement of consulting hadn't really come very far in the last few years and that its failure to do so represented a failed ambition. When we launched Source back in 2007 we met hundreds of procurement managers who were bristling with ambition and strategic intent: the old world, in which they'd played the role 0f gatekeeper and rubber-stamper, was passing, they told us. In its place, phoenix-like from the Ashes, would rise the procurement manager of the future: an enlightened individual who would be involved in a consulting project from one end to the other; on hand for trusted advice when a project was little more than a glint in a director's eye, and there at the end to appraise the efforts of the consultant and wave them on their way. It wasn't so much that nobody would dare to bring consultants in without involving procurement, it's that they wouldn't countenance it.

That, plainly, hasn't been the way of things, and I was interested to know, five years on, what procurement managers had to say about it.

What I expected was a room full of raised hackles and stern looks. What I got surprised me. There was a defense - the ambition was foundering on some pretty immovable rocks (like the difficulty of becoming the third party in a long-standing relationship between end-user and consultant), but more than anything else there was a concession: the ambition had been wrong. Anyone who thought that the future of consulting procurement had anything other than cost-reduction at its heart was kidding themselves. It isn't a strategic category, it's a tactical one.

Depressing though that thought may be for the illuminated procurers of this world (and I should point out that it's not one which everybody shared), what's refreshing is its honesty. Whatever other criticisms you care to lay at the door of procurement professionals (and we've laid a few at their door ourselves), they don't tend to trade in fluff and nonsense: they're at the sharp end of the transaction between client and consultant and they don't usually pull any punches when they talk about it. Some people would no-doubt rejoice at the idea of procurement stepping back into the shadows but it's a telling thing that that this type of person - in the type of role to which many had aspired - can't be accommodated in the consulting market. Theirs may be a failed ambition, it may - indeed - even be a wrong ambition, but perhaps the bigger failure here lies with the lack of willingness, on the part of the main protagonists on either side of the consulting market, to accept people in their midst who talk plainly and ask awkward questions.