In consulting, we add services only when it’s clear that clients need work done and every other option is worse.
Sometimes it feels like mucking out stables.
The work never ends, and just when you’re done it’s time to start again.
Take working with utility data, for example.
When I started out suppliers would email you billing files every month. Then portals came along and turned a one minute task into an hour of watching spinning loading screens.
And without the data, you’ve got nothing.
So we hired people, trained them as analysts and got them collecting and checking these bills.
We thought many times about outsourcing the task – but it takes a certain kind of person to care enough about getting this right – the detail, precision and technical complexity puts off most of the population.
And getting data and making sure it’s clean is the first step to doing everything else we do.
So we kept doing it in house. Because clients needed us to. And we had learned how to do it well.
This is the challenge clients have with outsourcing work- especially work that has to be done but isn’t strategically core to your business – like energy and carbon data management.
Jim Collins said it best – “If you can’t put your best people on it, then find someone else and get them to put their best people on it”.
Handcrafted insight 