I have often said that the same factors that give rise to difficulty in drawing up appropriate specifications for professional consultants, and for defining the type of deliverables that should be produced by the consultant who is hired, manifest themselves again when it comes to the evaluation of the work done.
Unless a client knows what good work looks like, how can a client assess the work that has been done? It is even more difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor and measure the work completed by consultants, taking into consideration the social distancing measures we all need to follow.
My experience over the years is that you need to have a very close and open relationship with the clients you work with to make sure they are getting true value for the money they are spending with your consultant company. The relationship between consultants and their clients is characterized by a considerable asymmetry of information.
In this type of relationship the client is unable to accurately evaluate the quality of the service or advise purchased.
As a result, evaluation of the quality of work done tends to be haphazard and generalized and in addition over influenced by the nature of the personal relationship that develops between the consultant and the manager of the client’s department.
Put simply, consultants are difficult to manage, primarily because the quality of the work that they are doing is difficult to assess.
Worsening this situation is that there is no guarantee that a municipality will necessarily get the specific consultant whom they are paying for, even when the municipality does offer to pay the consultant his or her normal hourly rate.
Although it is generally difficult for a lay client to monitor the quality of professional work, there are some common sense steps that can be taken to protect the municipality’s interest.
One basic step is to hold regular status meetings with the consultant.
Normally it would be cheaper to visit the consultant’s office, however during COVID-19 a virtual meeting will work fine.
If the project requires research, inspect the work that is submitted for some evidence of research. In the case of secondary research, such evidence might include references to or quotations from texts, articles and other published sources.
The main point I am trying to make is that hiring a consultant does not relieve the in-house manager of the responsibility for the work that is to be done or the quality of the work that is done.
On any internal project the project manager is held accountable for the success of the project. There is no particular reason to apply any other standard when dealing with work by consultants, subject, of course, to the reservation that the manager cannot be expected to second-guess the professional’s opinion.
To discharge this function, the manager should compare any draft of final work submitted to the specification that was set in the RFP for the consultant’s contract.
It is also necessary to look at the report that is delivered to determine whether it appears to conform to the deliverables that were specified in the RFP. As the project progresses you must continue to ask questions to determine the current state of the work.
The manager should work out some sort of formal quality assurance check that can be applied at the end of every agreed milestone.
Where a partial payment is to be made at a milestone, the manager should confirm that the criteria for payment have been satisfied.
When drawing up the contract, it is important to keep in mind the criteria must be clearly identified and must be of a kind that they will provide evidence of progress throughout the term of the project.
Stephen Bauld is a government procurement expert and can be reached at swbauld@purchasingci.com.
Some of his columns may contain excerpts from The Municipal Procurement Handbook published by Butterworths.
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