Lots of institutions are hurting right now. As is the tradition, when times trend towards being harder, a conga line of so called experts rush for the calculator app on their phone so they can insert new figures into their argument that consultants/capitalism/market dynamics/ massification of HE are killing the HE sector.
I was inspired to respond to mis-steps in The Australia Institute’s latest opinion piece/report on the spending priorities of the sector, but only because it is the latest in a procession of commentary which essentially suggest that the world would be all ok or at least slightly better if all consultants cease to exist. Suffice to say that calculating consultancy spends and then saying staff wouldn’t have to be sacked if the money was instead spent on staff assumes there is zero gain from the consultancies or projected changes in student demand trends.
Let’s get the conflict of interest out of the way. I work in various capacities, sometimes paid through in-house roles, sometimes for contracted projects, and sometimes as a consultant. In addition, I also do quite a bit of stuff for free – sometimes intentionally, other times because my invoices get lost or ignored for months at a time. I have also conducted organisational reviews to help universities TAFEs and other institutions improve their performance, and I stopped counting after the revenue growth tally went over $100 million. So I understand organisational structure, the joys of consulting and the huge benefits of working in-house.
Here’s where I think conversations have become lazy and unhelpful. When I look at say an IT team or a marketing and communications team there might be a budget of say $12 million, allocated from central revenue, usually with some sort of tax on faculties. Ultimately that money comes from student fees, research revenue and maybe philanthropy.
So how are those student fees / research and donor funds being spent? Say it’s a marketing and comms team, there might be 45 staff, accounting for 55% of the budget including oncosts, and 30% will be on advertising and promotions. Then there might be another 15% on stuff that the uni leadership want to happen, or that is a legacy from the past that no one has agreed to stop, or sponsorships and projects with uncertain return on investment.
How do you know that budget represents money well spent, or money wasted? What if there are five people in the social media team but no one talking to mature age students? What if all the effort is focused on markets that other unis now dominate, so you are only going to pick up desperate, low-ATAR students who require more support and will be tempted away to other options?
In addition to someone who understands how efficient teams work elsewhere and can provide some insights (usually employed as a consultant), what you probably also need now is a market researcher who can provide some evidence about whether the work is wonderful or wasted. But unless your budget is big enough to afford one in house (which is not the case for the poorest half of the sector, usually) then you have to contract one in. As a consultant.
The laid-off journalist who lives in your local regional community may be able to write you a course guide that really speaks to the local market for $20k+GST. As a consultant. Are you seriously suggesting that we would instead take up three months of the time of the full time writer on staff who is costing $120k a year including oncosts when we could get a better job done for half the money? The full-time writer in-house could be working on social media, or fundraising proposals, or a dozen other tasks if they don’t have the millstone of the course guide, but the mantra of always-in-house entrenches inefficiency and dissatisfaction in far too many teams.
For a sector that has grown rich on the back of the work of sessional academics and casual professional staff, it is lazy and unproductive to classify the value of work based on an individual’s employment status, or to live on in ideological idiocy of suggesting that every task a university must undertake is most effectively and efficiently delivered in-house (or conversely, outsourced).
Incidentally, whenever I do a review, I am always a huge advocate for doing as many jobs in-house as possible, to build continuity, maintain and pass on cultural knowledge, and reduce costs – as long as the role is well-structured, clearly aligned with institutional goals and performance managed so that staff get the chance to thrive and demonstrate their capabilities – and even one day get rewarded for effort.
And yes, I grind my teeth at the huge amounts charged by other consultancies that continue to get work instead of me simply because they do pretty PowerPoints and went to school with your wife’s friends. Especially when I see the nonsense that they often deliver afterwards.
But I don’t waste my time pretending that travel is bad (seriously – nobody who has ever had a serious role growing revenue or building collaborations thinks you can do that exclusively over Teams) and I don’t buy the infantile suggestion that all consultants – or all in-house staff – are a waste of time.
All humans should be accountable for adding value, regardless of their contractual status, and performance should be defined, managed and evaluated in a constructive process. Then we are going to start getting somewhere.
Tim Winkler is Publisher of Future Campus and Director of Twig Marketing.
