That last dynamic you described is exactly what I saw at a very well known university: upper management knew they weren’t getting the accurate details through the middle management filter, but shied away from fixing the cultural problems. Instead, a major consulting company was charging a considerable amount per hour to have 24 year olds with expensive suits interview the actual workers, summarize what they’d been telling their management for years, and present it directly to the senior level. Fixing the system would have saved millions but required fights they weren’t constitutionally well suited for.

Absolutely, but this is essentially saying "We're okay paying a 2-10% tax on our revenue, forever."

I think that's the reason you tend to see these unhealthy dynamics in extremely conservative, quasi-monopoly industries (government, financial, healthcare), where there's no real question of if they'll be a going concern. And no real rewards / attempts to outperform at the cost of increased risk.

Critically, if someone within the org volunteers to organize and manage the cross departmental knowledge they'll be shut down by people within the company for trying to accumulate power or stepping into someone else's turf.

Only an outsider can safely talk to everyone. They aren't a threat because they aren't part of the company and therefore can't take over.

It cannot be volunteer work. It has to be sponsored from the top. If it is, then a team of qualified FTEs can do this job similar to an external consultancy. But rarely will old-timer well-settled FTEs will leave their current position and take on this temporary risky gig.

Also, the end result and the path to get there isn't clear for FTEs – let's say they did the functional domain requirement gathering work – then who will implement it – they will have to contract out the development work – they may not be empowered to think and see through to the end goal fully.

On the other hand, for the top management folks – it is easier to temporarily empower the external consultants and terminate the engagement with them at any time – but they cannot do the same with FTEs due to employment laws etc.

What if it wasn't temporary, but just part of the CEOs office? The first goal should be to actively prevent these foul-ups by keeping open lines of communication.

I've always thought that a team like this is critical to keeping a company running. Any org that's 1000+ needs a 5-7 person team outside of any department that the CEO can throw at problems, but no org that I'm aware of has adopted this structure.

I can attest that the second modus operandi is the way long time contracts work from my experience.

Nearly every time all the knowledge and skills necessary are hidden and fragmented inside our client's org. With our access through all the management layers and silos we could work to fullfil the contract and also enable change within the client organisation and culture.

But why kill the golden goose? Our higher people' bonuses depend on us being the glue as someone else wrote in another comment. And a lot of my colleagues actually on the client's really do a great job in opening lines of communication. They work their a*es of to help the client.

Sadly helping isn't a monetary long term strategy for upper levels.

In the end

Though mostly about ladder climbing and relationship drama, the show 'House of Lies' has some really good scenes where the management consultants do actual work, which is pretty much portrayed as doing the things you've listed. Even as a fictional show, it made it easier for me to understand these situations and not get so flustered when encountering them.

I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate.

Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.

Heh. That stuff has always felt like an inexplicably weird trope, like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles.

After 8 hours in a windowless conference room with a parade of stakeholders, making RACI matrices on a stained whiteboard and scarfing down cafeteria sandwiches during "bio-break," I want to _talk to my wife on the phone then stare blankly at the ceiling_, not go out for a night on the town.

laughs Agreed. The most interest thing I tended to do was "What looks like a good restaurant in this area?"

... did get really good at reading between the lines of Yelp / maps reviews. (Objectively, friends have since commented on it)

> like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles.

Upvote just for this line of poetry. Mondo 2000, haven’t heard that name in decades.

How do tech consultants approach their work?

I am definitely biased by my past experiences with tech consultants. I’m trying to sort out if it’s a service provider issue or if it’s a customer side issue.

From my limited perspective, it seems management consultants are focused on 80/20 solution approaches. While it seems technical consultants are focused on delivering MVPs that don’t seem to map well to the business space.

The disincentive that tech consulting has is that jobs (at least in my area) were usually bid at fixed price.

I have no idea if that's the way larger firms do it (would expect not).

Consequently, profit = contract price - consultant hours. Every bad happened from minimizing the latter.

Even if you do straight up billable hours with the client, your time was typically scheduled 1-2 projects in advance. This lead to being prematurely (in terms of things being "done") rolled off a project, onto a new one, and finishing / supporting the first from your hotel after-hours.

This was in a pretty cowboy area. I imagine different parts of technical consulting behave differently.

But yes, MVP quality code seems to be a constant. I saw that delivered from a top-tier technical consulting firm (ML solution) to a T100 customer.

> until the money runs dry.

And once a year as the government decides its budget you get to chew your nails as you wait to see if the money is in the next budget.