Comment by Pingk
20 hours ago
This is often made worse as a result of hiring outside consultants. Firstly they don't have the institutional knowledge you have when starting a project, but they also aren't incentivised to properly document and hand over their knowledge at the end since that means less future work.
This is why a lot of government projects take so long, they don't see the value in keeping an in-house team of trained experts (see the difference in train line contruction costs in the UK compared to Spain), until you realised how good they were but you can't hire them back.
Back when Anderson Consulting hadn't yet disgraced itself, a corp I worked for hired them for a cost-cutting project. "Find ways we can cut costs."
Blew my mind that 22-year olds, fresh out of good-brand universities (their "qualification"), were doing the research on how to cost-cut. Chesterton's fences all over the place were violated. It was sad watching the slow-moving disaster.
That’s a great point. In my city, they started paving side streets with with in-house staff. They have dedicated funded budget, government can borrow cheaply, and they don’t need to price risk and margin.
Over 5 years, they spend 30-40% less depending on utilization of equipment. (We had a two slow years due to pandemic and weather)
For the work that’s funded by state aid or grants, they use contractors as its a variable workload.
I am currently on a team of consultants. Ironically, most of us have more institutional knowledge than the client due to internal churn. Seems like every few years they try to cut our utilization in favor of some off-shore company that's "cheaper", the project blows up, then we have to jump in and save some middle manager's job.