Within any organization, you can have 3 or 6 important people pushing in completely different strategic directions. And it can be clear to any unbiased observer that there's only one good, responsible choice, but within your org that gets met with essentially "but that's just your opinion, man".

So you call in a consulting firm and they deliver what most of the people already know. The consultants don't need to be rocket scientists.

But afterwards, nobody can say it's just your opinion any more. It's now expert analysis that you paid good $$$ for, and everybody who disagreed before now basically has to get on board.

So it's not even necessarily political "cover", but almost like a referee that brings enough credibility to settle otherwise intractable internal disputes.

Also, this lets the CEO appear unbiased to all the people who "lost". So they can get on board with the new policy but not feel like the CEO shot them down personally, which is bad for morale, can lead them to quit, etc. (Just because they believed in the wrong strategy doesn't mean they still can't be super-valuable in the future in executing the right strategy.)

The flip side is that it is also bad for morale for someone to be recommending a solution for some time, the recommendation is ignored, a consultant is hired, the consultant recommends the same solution, and then the recommendation is implemented. This is exacerbated when the consultant's fee is some large percent or maybe even a multiple of the salary of the person who originally recommended the solution. It makes the original employee feel worthless and doubt the leadership's ability to properly evaluate solutions.

It’s their idea, and the company didn’t have a process in place to let them present it except through your consulting engagement. Sure, if it’s a good outcome for the employee to work with you to get things implemented fine, but it still stings a bit that someone from the outside was trusted more than an invested employee before any traction occurred.

See also: “let’s hire a consulting firm to recommend an operating model to us.” (Often before we’ve asked our own employees)

I understand that, as the employee whose ideas have gone unheard, this whole situation may be perceived as a ridiculous waste of time and money. Sometimes it actually is. It might be management's own inability to discern good ideas from bad, a poor understanding of the business or technology problems they face, the solutions available on the market, or lack of trust in their own staff.

More often it's simply managers looking for a broader perspective from an outsider who has engaged other organizations with similar business and technology problems. I start with the understanding that they're sincerely looking to do the right thing until they give me reason to believe otherwise.

Do you have any recommendations on resources/articles/books, either for "rank and file" trying to ensure their messages are framed well, or for consultants or others who find themselves in situations helping ideas to cut through the noise?

I'll share one that I've found incredibly helpful in the past: "Never Split The Difference" by Chris Voss https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014DUR7L2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

It doesn’t matter that the $3M advice is given by someone barely more than an undergraduate. McKinsey wouldn’t still be a company if they fucked people over like that would they? (hint: They would)

The OP’s point about morale impact,however, still stands regardless of a consultant’s intentions, I think. Further, the fact that shorter engagement consultants will not really understand your org even with outside experience which is hugely exasperating for “human capital”, “change management” or “just do X” IT improvement decks.

So many organizations go straight to the outside instead of trying to establish some healthy internal dialog around improvement. To me this is an anti-pattern, and happens to be hugely profitable for consultancies.

Speaking as a consultant, my experience has been the opposite. I have walked into many organizations, said <obviously good thing>, and been hailed as a hero by the handful of folks who had been saying <obviously good thing> all along because FINALLY someone gets it! These are people who have been killing themselves in the trenches fighting this fight forever. When you finally show up and resolve it it's like the Army of the Dead in Return of the King. Fight's over, you can go bask in your "told you so" afterglow now.

It also turns out that most of the time, those people may have been smart enough to get <obviously good thing>, but were pretty bad at communicating the value of <obviously good thing> to anyone who mattered or at making a plan for how to get from <bad thing> to <obviously good thing>.

All of this is not to credit McKinsey or any of big consulting. They mostly provide a "signature method" to launder your your obvious observations into a glitzy powerpoint presentation to make it look like you applied rigorous testing and experience to what was really a cursory observation your entry level analyst made. All the people with actual experience are too busy killing themselves at business development and facilitating this "observation laundering" process to apply their brain power to developing actual insights.

There is nothing stupid or evil about how "organization" behaves. It's exactly same as the society we all live in, just at a smaller scale. When you are in the position to make the call, you see that someone's idea may be as good as someone else's idea. How do you decide which idea is right? Do you choose one and fire the other with another idea? What happens when a wrong decision is made? This is the exactly reason why CEO or executives make compromises. They have responsibility to make sure that the organization survives no matter which scenario pans out. Junior staff often don't understand this because they can always move onto another opportunity when things collapse. As their career progresses, they also come to understand that you can't torch the field just because you don't like the crop growing there - it's much harder to find fertile land to begin with.

As people move up they either still know the business or they don't. Not trusting the people whom are running the actual business is IMO terrible.

The COO at the company I work for (recently left) could describe the daily work in detail. He could have conversations with any recently hired staff, various level of management, but also with the board, investors and customers. Lastly, he (amazingly) knew all the people he worked with before. No matter if that person 10+ years later is still in the same position (or not).

IMO having a good network, being able to communicate with various levels is highly beneficial. Your post seems to suggest some staff should not be taken seriously. That's utterly weird to me.

> How do you decide which idea is right?

From your post it seems one of the options is not to listen to staff. Further, junior staff won't gain experience if you do not let them develop.

> They have responsibility to make sure that the organization survives no matter which scenario pans out.

For one, why isn't this explained? Secondly, some decisions are bad without actually going into it any further. Then multiple years are wasted while everyone involved knew this from the start; they were just not listened to.

IMO regarding "scenario pans out": for some cases it's entirely true. But also sometimes it's not the case at all... just nobody listened to the people running the business and too much disconnect.

Ironically the situation is exacerbated leaving the person exasperated.

When HN "published" your letter to the editor, it's not printed on atoms and distributed all over town, or mailed out to subscribers.

You can post a comment, edit it, and maybe even fix something based on feedback. I suggest that without being completely slipshod, it's better to go ahead and make a comment when you have a coherent thought.

The community will help you sort out any spelling, grammar, or attribution hiccups. I think this is a good thing for everyone, reducing friction and eliminating even self-gate-keeping.

Mixing up two homophones is not a tragedy. Someone not contributing because they fear that they'll be snubbed for getting a word wron? That's a tragedy.

JM2C, &c.

And this was with a DR who stuck up for me and mentioned to the CEO directly that we paid a consultancy big bucks to tell us something a chorus of engineering team members have been saying for years.

The consultants aren't the ones taking the money home, the firm is. So don't blame the 23 year old. He or she is honestly just doing their insane best to pay off their huge student loans.

Here, consultants are ripping off taxpayers because a Clinton-era rule financially incentivized the government to outsource work to “entrepreneurs”. This department is literally given a percentage of the money it gives to consultants.

The incentive to get more dollars if you get more under management as a contract-service-provider does make sense. They’re not a monopoly on procurement in government, despite the author writing a book about monopolies.

Note: in some cases they have monopolies on some things in government, but not procurement.

Could we get the same result by allocating the GSA a flat amount based on what they need and then penalize them by cutting the budget if no one uses their services, just like we do for other agencies?

I remember one awkward situation i was familiar with where two diametrically opposed groups both notionally hired the same consultancy firm to write their respective proposals/submissions.

No points for guessing whether the consultancy offered the same advice...

Funny in one sense, but only because if you don't laugh you'll cry...

A values approach to this problem would be promoting people with good taste, and then building a culture of acquiescing when they decide to step in. If someone doesn't like that, fuck 'em. Yeah it might hurt in the short term, but every time you let people with bad taste stall the show you erode your culture a little, until one day you come to work and realize that nobody can decide anything anymore.

An equilibrium approach is to say "well, a consultant will cost $3M/year, and potentially pissing off Alice and Bob and Carol and maybe Dan is painful and it's difficult to calculate how much that will cost, and $3M < UNDEFINED == TRUE so let's hire McKinsey".

I have a huge soft spot for economics, but the thing about equilibria like this is that they never account for externalities and long term costs, and $3M < UNDEFINED is just bad logic to use, and also it's spineless and cowardly and people should know better.

Or, there ISN'T a clear exactly one good responsible choice, it really is a matter of judgement and/or choice of priorities/values... and then whoever can exert the most control over the contractor can still get their way by getting the contractor to pick their side.

TIL The Dude is a phenomenal businessman.

I have done lots and lots and lots of enterprise sales and consulting, and a big part of bringing in outsiders is to provide the illusion of social proof.

"Well, we had the experts in, and they found..."

That sounds really, really terrible when put so cynically, but the flip side of that is to view it as insurance. If you bring the consultants in, hoping that they will recommend Plan A, and Plan A is truly terrible, a reputable consultant will find a way to sell you on Plan B, by couching it as "A few adjustments to Plan A."

So in effect, yes, it is about making changes management wanted all along, but in addition to providing the illusion of social proof, you can also get an extra set of eyes to make sure that you don't completely footgun yourself.

Sometimes. Maybe. If the consultants are good at both analysis and selling management on adjusting their plans...

It's not that the work is or isn't valuable, or where that value is. It's that McKinsey charges 72% more than a competitor for the same consulting, and that there's a massive perverse incentive for public servants in charge of awarding contracts to pick the most expensive one.

From the article, bias left in:

Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.

...

And this gets to the second reason why McKinsey can charge so much, which has to do less with McKinsey and more with an incentive to overpay more generally. It’s more likely something called the ‘Industrial Funding Fee,’ or IFF. The GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service gets a cut of whatever certain contractors spend using the GSA’s schedule, and this cut is the IFF. The IFF is priced at .75% of the total amount of a government contract. In the case of McKinsey, since 2006, “FAS has realized $7.2 million in Industrial Funding Fee revenue.”

...

Does McKinsey do a good job? The answer is that it’s probably no better or worse than anyone else. I’m sure there are times when McKinsey is quite helpful, but it’s in all probability vastly overpriced for what it is, which is basically a group of smart people who know how to use powerpoint presentations and speak in soothing tones. You can just go through news clippings and find areas McKinsey did cookie cutter nonsense. For instance, McKinsey helped ruin an IT implementation for intelligence services. In the immigration story, MacDougall shows that the consulting firm encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees. That’s cruelty, not efficiency.

I'm not quite following your logic here, could you elaborate a bit more? There's nothing prohibiting well-funded competitors from similar GSA approval, is there? My understanding is that this method is used to streamline contract awards...being listed on a GSA schedule means you've gotten a stamp of pre-approval (i.e., you've checked all the boxes to meet government contract requirements).

An overly simplified example would be that an agency can go from a whole soup-to-nuts bid process that takes, say, nine months to award. Or, they could select a contractor from a GSA schedule list of contractors and have it awarded in two months. Those numbers are arbitrary, but hopefully you get the point. Agencies have a variety of reasons they may want to hurry the process along, but over-paying isn't likely one of them.

Further, most government contracts go to "lowest bidder"; in order to be awarded to a higher priced contractor, they usually need to be part of a "best value" contract that is generally more difficult to justify.

I could be off on this, but understanding has been that the government is almost overly incentivized to award to the lower bidder, even when the lower bidder is the riskier bet.

Another excerpt:

> In 2013, the GSA Inspector General traced a similar situation with different contractors. Managers at GSA overruled line contracting officers to raise prices taxpayer pay for contractors Carahsoft, Deloitte and Oracle. Government managers at GSA micro-managed and harassed their subordinates and damaged the careers of contracting officers trying to negotiate fair prices for the taxpayer.

The connecting dot that's missing is why agencies choose the more expensive option when it benefits the GSA, not the agency using their schedule.

For the perverse IFF incentive structure logic to hold true, it seems like GSA would be incentivized to approve rate increases across the board. Why just McKinsey?

In other words, the GSA sets the contract but not the order. If there are cheaper contracts available in place on the GSA schedule, I would think agencies are incentivized to choose the lower bid.

edit: mistakenly stated "agencies" instead of "contractors" regarding what gets listed

It's good. I suggest you read it. Interrogating my two sentence oversimplification of the forest is not a useful way to learn about this.

The IG report points out real problems, but I think people are extrapolating too far because they don't truly understand how contracts are awarded via the GSA schedule. I think people are confusing being awarded a listing on a GSA schedule with an actual order. Being on the GSA schedule just means is there is an agreed upon price for a product or service. An agency still needs to chose that product or service before any money changes hands.

The GSA essentially produces a catalogue of products and services. Like the article mentions, it seems like the GSA allowed McKinsey to name their price and that is, as the article says, "honest graft". The article also implies other contractors are also listed, although they don't get similar preferential price treatment. So the GSA isn't down-selecting the number of "items" listed in the "catalogue" to force agencies into selecting the expensive McKinsey. It's just inflating the price of one item. What isn't covered is why agencies are selecting the more expensive item. To me, that is where the real corruption would be.

To play devil's advocate, the whole IG issue could potentially be attributed to a bad contracting supervisor who reassigned the contracting officer who was fighting against the price increase. The fact that the other companies were denied similar price increases indicates to me that it's not a cultural issue of "honest graft".

While some of us have run with my oversimplification, there are plenty of comments in this sub-thread about down-selecting. Your answer to that is a giant assumption on what the article (which again is rigorously sourced) 'implies'.

> The article also implies other contractors are also listed, although they don't get similar preferential price treatment.

In fact, the IG report[0] that is cited in the selection of the article I replied with has nothing to do with McKinsey, but a different contractor altogether. Reading comprehension is your friend here: "In 2013, the GSA Inspector General traced a similar situation with different contractors."

Agencies aren't necessarily selecting the more expensive item. As you point out, in most cases they have a mandate not to. They're awarding the bid to an already-short list designed to generate the highest IFF possible for the GSA.

Which is what the article's about.

[0]https://www.gsaig.gov/sites/default/files/audit-reports/A120...

> They're awarding the bid to an already-short list

This makes it sound like the GSA is forcing agencies to select from a small handful of contractors from a list catered to make the GSA the most money. I don't think it's actually true and it seems like it's inferred from the article without evidence. There are literally thousands of vendors just in the IT Services schedule mentioned in the article[1].

What seems more likely is what another commenter stated. Agencies select the excessively expensive McKinsey because they are essentially buying social capital.

Edit: there’s actually over 13k vendors listed under IT services [2]

[1]https://www.gsa.gov/technology/technology-purchasing-program...

[2] https://www.gsaelibrary.gsa.gov/ElibMain/scheduleSummary.do?...

There is a confluence of two dynamics going on here. The first is that once a contractor is listed on the GSA schedule, you don't have to justify their price. The process of getting listed on the GSA Schedule is supposed to mean that the government has already vetted the goods being offered and the price they're being offered for. No further competition is needed. You can simply place an order for the goods or service listed and like magic it sails through the government procurement process.

So the next question is, if contractor A and contractor B are both listed on the GSA Schedule as providing a given service, and contractor A is twice as expensive as contractor B, why would any rational individual choose contractor A? And the answer is, in this case, you aren't paying for the advice. You're paying for the social capital needed to make the advice stick. If all you wanted was the advice, you could certainly go to contractor B and pay them twice minimum wage to get a 23-year year old college graduate to give you advice. But that advice would not carry the weight you need to get upper management to take it as gospel, because you clearly didn't pay enough money for that. Nobody cares if you pay $50,000 to get consultant advice and then ignore what they told you.

So what you do instead is pick the name with the most cachet out of the entire list, given that you don't have to justify the price on a cost-benefit curve any more since it's already been GSA approved, knowing full well that they'll give you identical advice but now with a million-dollar price tag attached... and that fact will carry enough weight to get the changes they recommend all the way up to your agency director, who'll either sign off or have to take an incredible amount of public heat explaining why he/she didn't take the advice his/her own agency spent millions of dollars to get.

Basically, a straightforward application of the Washington Post rule.

Therefore, the GSA has an incentive to have a very short list of highly paid consultants.

The individual agencies using the scheduled are supposed to pick the low bid, but if GSA has restricted the schedule, well, we all get ripped off.

Take the example schedule used in the article:

>McKinsey asked for 10-14% price hike for its already expensive IT professional services (which is a catch-all for anything).

The IT services schedule lists over 13,000 vendors [1]. McKinsey is listed on this schedule under four categories: 132-32, 132-50, 132-51, and 70-500. The most relevant to the article is 132-51, "IT Professional Services" which has 3,872 other contractors listed besides McKinsey. I personally wouldn't consider that evidence of the GSA restricting the schedule or indicative of a monopoly. This is what led me to my previous question as to why an agency would select the more expensive McKinsey given a reasonable amount of competition.

The ghostwriting brought up is a genuine concern and I would be in favor of investigating other funding mechanisms outside of the IFF pay structure. However, the author admits they are selling a book about how politics and monopoly are intertwined. Speaking of perverse incentives, I worry that the conclusions drawn are too heavily biased to support the book thesis rather than objectively looking at the broader context.

[1] https://www.gsaelibrary.gsa.gov/ElibMain/scheduleSummary.do?...

So the bidding process gets corrupted, ignored, anything and everything the staff can do to inflate the contracts so they get more IFF back.

That IFF honestly sounds like the cleverest pork barrel hack since all the military contractors got theirs set up...

The article talks about the IG finding evidence that the GSA improperly approved cost increases for McKinsey. This makes sense in regards to perverse incentives but I didn't see anything about the GSA shutting out less costly competitors from the schedule of approved contractors. Since the GSA generally doesn't award contracts, I would expect to see some evidence that McKinsey was unduly favored in the schedule listing for stronger evidence of corruption.

There's no reason at all why BCG can't submit better rates. But that ensures the corrupted decision making will have the awards go to someone else. No one was preventing other bids, they just had the selection process locked up.

McKinsey wasn't favored in listings, only in the off-the-record selection bias.

The GSA schedule mentioned in the article has 3000+ other vendors offering similar services. They all have been awarded GSA contracts. However, no purchase orders are attributed to those contracts until a government employee looks through that list of thousands of vendors and selects a specific vendor at the contract rate. The GSA doesn't actually select the execution of the contract, they just list the contract as part of the schedule of approved vendors.

It's like listing an app on the Google Play Store that charges 30%. That 30% is like the IFF from the article. Is it unethical if Google allows you to specify a really expensive app price? You could set your app price arbitrarily high like McKinsey but your app price is a moot point if nobody selects your app and instead chooses your competitors. What's interesting is that agencies do select McKinsey, indicated they at least perceive those costs are justified over the competitors listed on the same schedule.

They get to ghost write their own assignment.

That contract isn't executed until another agency decides to use that service or product. The end-user agency benefits from a streamlined procurement process but does not receive any percentage of the contract. They are generally de-incentivized from selecting an expensive contract from the schedule, all things being equal.

Contractors influencing an unfair price is still a problem, but much less so if there are other contractors offering comparable products/services at a better rate because agencies are forced to buy the expensive option. What I haven't seen is discussion or evidence that the price inflation is systemic across a schedule that would elevate this to a full-blown scandal.

As stated in other replies, this doesn't appear to be nearly as outrageous as the article is interpreted in this discussion unless the GSA is inflating costs across the board. In the absence of that, end-using agencies can just select the cheaper option.

What was eluded to by another comment is that the more expensive contract may be selected if it's perceived to carry other social value above competitors. (e.g., "If it's coming from the prestigous McKinsey, it must be accurate")

I sometimes wonder what the demographic looks like, since most replies betray 1) lack of actual domain expertise and 2) the humility required to recognize (1)

But their delivery model is incredible: they make customers woo them (shouldn't vendors be doing the wooing?), and they have a prescribed way of doing things if they decide you're worthy to purchase their product. What you get in return is a constant cudgel of "this is the Epic way" to yield when talking with practitioners who are used to doing things their own way (especially doctors—nurses are more flexible and pragmatic, in my experience). This can be especially useful when you have a system of multiple facilities that's grown through acquisitions, with each facility having decades of accumulated practices that aren't quite aligned with your other locations.

However, I think there are other circumstantial values that appear alongside the one you identify. I find that consultants not only provide cover, but also provide a level of focus on non-immediate, but important, problems that doesn't otherwise materialize on its own. Nobody wants to be seen wasting the highly paid consultant's time so you often get people paying attention when they might not otherwise. There's also setting the stage for what ends up as a sort of professional group therapy sessions and with the consultant as a mediator. I think you touch on that, but maybe I see some greater emphasis on that bit.

The difference is usually whether the companies involved had the money and focus to mostly follow the consultant’s plan or whether it gets bogged down in customizations and committees of internal stakeholders at the company.

I’ve also seen a couple stall because 3rd party vendors over promised and totally dropped the ball but it’s usually the vendors that the company was locked into before the consultant came on board or some niche product with no good vendors in the space.

The other thing management consultants do is industrial espionage -- they go into a company to learn how it work, and then advise other companies on how "industry leaders" operate.

This one doesn't get mentioned enough, I think. They'll happily sell you an outline of what you need to do to be in line with "industry best practices", where those practices are all the things your competitors are doing better than you (and guess what they'll sell those companies if they spot anything you're doing better than they are? Where do you think they learned about those "best practices" in the first place?).

It's basically a kind of weird, expensive, inefficient, unofficial business process collaborative R&D program.

That's a great elevator pitch for Gartner.

Basically they need a bunch of people who are really good at ingesting a ton of data, analyzing it, and summarizing it.

Turns out those are exactly the same skills involved in writing academic papers, which gets you good grades.

So these people really are statistically disproportionately the people in Ivy League schools and similar who also got high GPA's in those schools.

So there's some reality behind what you call a myth.

(Obviously you can still be awesome at that and not have gone to an Ivy League school, that goes without saying.)

Edit: in response to a comment below... also you can of course be at an Ivy and not be a good writer too. Which is why consulting firms tend to have extremely selective hiring on campus through interviews with many rounds where most applicants get rejected, and pay huge attention to your GPA at college.

With college grade inflation and the fear of blowback from failing well-connected ivy students, the only guarantee you get from hiring an average Ivy League student is that you have someone who can write high school essays well. The typical undergrad graduate still barely has any critical thinking ability.

If you want people fresh out of school who can ingest data, analyze it, and summarize it, you want good grad students. Good grad students come from non-Ivy schools more often than not.

The only industries that care about Ivy League at this point are the ones where connections matter more than intellectual ability. Everywhere else has recognized that the pedigree is not a useful signal (see Google’s hiring data on this).

The only conclusion you can always make about someone who graduated from a prestigious college is that many people will find this impressive. That's not to say this has no value, clearly it does.

One can also graduate from an Ivy and definitely not have these skills.

Although one might think that these folks are not consultants at McKinsey, I humbly suggest that this is incorrect — there are plenty of folks who McKinsey brings in for their social capital and/or social skills. Certain athletes and certain folks who know how to socialize with a given class of clients are just as valuable as the grinders, perhaps more so since the “face” of the organization leads to sales and client retention.

The person/human is significantly more important.

After working with duds from top schools, I'm not sure why it happens. How do they get accepted? How do they graduate? How did they get past interviews?

No argument here. Every single time that I've been in an organization that has brought in management consultants, the results of their work were almost exactly in line with advice that we had been feeding upper management for some time.

It's infuriating to have the right answers to solve problems while people at the top ignore good advice and then spend huge amounts of money to get that good advice repeated to them by other people.

Even worse is when upper management acts like the consultant advice is the first time they've heard those recommendations.

In france, its a classic move by big companies to have mbb formalize what they already know: a need to restructure which unfortunately involves firing people. Its easier to justify restructuring because mbb said so than because the company says so for some reason ^^

[1] http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm

Is it a legal thing? European regulation tends to be quite aggressive when people get laid off, so I imagine that an external assessment helps give some cover for that.

Firing is somewhat more expensive, but if you want to close a location it is just an X million more not anything really complicated. Bigger chance the employees will be organized and fight in court, but in reality if management wants you out you will be.

The consultants are for the people who stay. You fire some group A, then you fire your consultations then group remain feels "Safe" again, when the bad consultants are gone.

However there are provisions that allow a company to lay off whole percentages of its workforce if the company is planning to face financial difficulties or similar. This has to be justified somehow so better get external reports to cover your ass.

High end consultancies have sold oursourcing that decimated the UKs IT orgs, and are now selling in-sourcing, whilst in reality many are just selling outsourcing to them with new buzzwords like DevOps and microservices.

It might be what the businesses wanted to do all along, but I'm not sure it's what they "knew they should be doing".

Super common scenario:

* The business thinks IT is too slow to implement, and doesn't understand business needs

* IT thinks the business changes priority too much and doesn't even understand their own business processes, and it's leading to technical debt because the demands of the business are half-baked

* So, the business brings in a consultant who says they will do everything they want, without any push-back, in half the time

It gives someone the political cover to make changes beyond their typical power that they knew were necessary.

Many large organizations are compartmentalized into divisions that act almost as independent sub-organizations. In these organizations, someone might have plenty of clout/budget/authority to bring in a consultant in their division, but not enough clout to convince a cross-divisional decision maker without some help.

For example: The President of MegaCorp North America thinks the Director of MegaCorp Widget Sales is whiny and asks for too many budget increases without a plan to the President's standard. Meanwhile, the reality is that everyone in MegaCorp Widget Sales knows they need this new piece of software. So, the Director of MegaCorp Widget Sales uses $100,000 of his existing budget to bring in some consultants to do a strategy plan for phase 1. Those consultants write up the same things that the Director and his employees have been asking for, but they put it in a shiny proposal with plenty of buzzwords. This satisfies the President sufficiently enough to award the budget increase for the phase 2 implementation project.

Or the political cover to make the changes they wanted to make all along.

Wash, rinse, repeat with the big 4.

There is a difference, sometimes subtle sometimes not so