Okay, I’ll admit it. The title is deliberately dramatic. It’s designed to get people reading. Not all consultants suck. Some are worth their weight in gold. But after reading yet another newspaper story about universities spending a small fortune on consultants for projects that went nowhere, followed by another about consultants behaving badly (or, in some cases, illegally), I found myself getting a little cross.
Cross because it doesn’t have to be this way. Cross because the good consultants get tarred with the same brush. And cross because universities, their staff and their students deserve better.
If you’ve ever sat through one of these projects, there’s a fair chance this story will resonate.
Monday morning déjà vu
It’s Monday. You’re a senior leader at a university. You’ve just left a two-hour steering committee meeting where another major ‘transformation project’ was discussed.
The consultants were there. An army of well-dressed, super-smart 25-year-olds, accompanied by a couple of very smooth older types brought in to provide gravitas and an air of mature calm.
They brought slides. Lots of slides. Diagrams, pyramids, process flows, new acronyms and an abundance of matrices and formulas that probably work beautifully in the corporate world.
They talked about ‘activating transformational catalysts’ and ‘future-ready ecosystems’. They mentioned a ‘target operating model’. You nodded. Everyone nodded.
Because that’s what we do. We want to believe that university challenges are just like regular business challenges. That solutions developed in the corporate world can simply be transplanted into our institutions and, hey presto, everything will be better.
Then came the game-changing recommendation: a restructure, a new martech stack or perhaps some agentic AI.
Of course, they might not call it a restructure. It could be an alignment, a realignment, workforce simplification or, my personal favourite, sustainabilisation (I’m still not entirely convinced that’s a word).
And perhaps they won’t call it martech or AI either. Maybe it’s a digital transformation, an omnichannel growth system, a predictive intelligence layer, an agentic ecosystem, a cradle-to-grave platform or a digital revolution.
Or, to put it another way, a magically-solve-every-problem-you’ve-ever-had-or-ever-will-have system. Implementation time: five years.
But is any of this really transformational? The dictionary defines transformation as a complete or dramatic change in the form, appearance, nature or character of something.
How many university transformation projects have you seen that have actually transformed a university into something fundamentally different? More often than not, what you get is the same university, with a slightly different org chart, a new set of acronyms and a rather large invoice.
Why some consultants suck
Let’s be clear. Not all consultants suck. Just a very particular breed of jargon-slinging, slide-deck-wielding, metric-manipulating types who thrive on the complexity they help create.
They’re often people who have never actually worked in a university. They sell transformation through a beautifully polished PowerPoint presentation, followed by a seven-figure implementation plan.
These ones suck.
Why?
Because what they’re selling as transformation is often just rearrangement.
Move people into new boxes. Move the chairs around. Rename teams. Rename faculties. Merge faculties. Put functions together because they have similar-sounding names. Separate functions because someone put them together in the last restructure.
Create a new layer of management. Remove a layer of management. Introduce a new system that nobody really knows how to use.
Promise results in five years, by which time everyone involved in commissioning the project has probably moved on.
And, of course, there’s always the J-curve. Things will get worse before they get better. Much worse, potentially. But don’t worry, the benefits are just around the corner. Somewhere. Probably in Phase Two.
In the end, what have you got?
- A new structure with fewer people sitting in different chairs, mostly doing the same work as before.
- Embittered staff, exhausted by months of disruption.
- A shiny new system with three out of 78 features actually being used.
- A permanent ‘Phase Two’ that never quite arrives.
- An invoice the size of Africa.
And still … disengaged students, burnt-out teams and very little evidence of actual improvement.
The human cost
These projects are sold as bold visions for the future. In reality, they’re often a few organisational chart changes, some new names for old things and a shiny new piece of technology.
But there’s a human cost that rarely makes it into the final presentation.
Teams spend months wondering what their future looks like. Good staff leave or accept redundancies. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. People who actually understand how things work become too exhausted, disillusioned or simply too cautious to speak up.
And the consultants?
They’re already on a plane to the next engagement. Probably using your university as a case study in their next pitch.
What to do about it
So, what’s the alternative?
Stop hiring consultants who want to transform your organisational chart. Start engaging experts who want to improve your outcomes and make your institution better at what it does.
The first question should always be: why are we engaging a consultant in the first place?
When a consultant actually makes sense
You can see the symptoms but can’t diagnose the root cause.
Something isn’t working. Applications are down, student satisfaction is slipping or recruitment isn’t converting. You know there’s a problem, but you’re not entirely sure why. A good consultant brings a fresh perspective, asks the right questions and helps identify what’s actually going wrong.
You know what needs to be done, but don’t have the capacity to do it.
The strategy is clear, but your team is already running on fumes. A consultant can provide the additional expertise and practical support needed to turn ideas into action.
The problem is big, messy and uncertain.
Sometimes you need someone to help untangle complexity, map a way forward and maintain momentum when internal energy is running low. That’s a legitimate reason to bring in outside help.
You’re dealing with multiple stakeholders and competing agendas.
A genuinely independent third party can facilitate difficult conversations, build consensus and keep everyone focused on shared objectives. Sometimes an external voice can say what internal people can’t.
You need external credibility to get a decision made.
It happens. Internal recommendations get ignored, parked or buried under competing priorities. An independent consultant who does their due diligence and arrives at the same conclusion can sometimes give an idea the credibility and traction it needs.
The expertise simply doesn’t exist in-house.
Whether it’s market benchmarking, data strategy or a very specific international recruitment challenge, sometimes the knowledge isn’t sitting around the university waiting to be discovered. A good specialist consultant brings focused, current expertise that fills a genuine gap.
And when should you leave the consultants out of it?
You’re using a consultant to avoid making a difficult decision.
If leadership is stalling and hoping an external consultant will validate a decision they’ve already made, save yourself the money. Toughen up and make the call.
You’re under pressure to spend a budget before it disappears.
The use-it-or-lose-it approach to spending can produce some truly extraordinary projects. If there’s something worthwhile you’ve been waiting to do, great. But don’t invent a project simply because there’s money left in the budget.
You want to outsource blame or accountability.
If the consultant is being brought in as a convenient shield rather than a genuine solution, the outcome is unlikely to be pretty. Leadership responsibility cannot be subcontracted.
There’s no genuine intention to change.
Engaging a consultant without the institutional will to act on their recommendations is a recipe for wasted money and frustration on both sides. You can’t outsource the desire to improve.
Consultants can bring enormous value, but only when there’s clarity about why they’re needed and what they’re expected to achieve.
The more clearly you can articulate the problem, the better positioned a consultant will be to help solve it. And if you don’t yet have that clarity, good consultants will often spend some time with you, without charging the earth, helping you work out what the actual challenge is.
Five ways to get the best out of a consultant
Once you’ve decided that external support is genuinely needed, here are five ways to make sure you get something more valuable than a beautiful slide deck.
- Choose practitioners, not theorists
Work with people who have actually done the job. Better still, people who have done your job and understand the complexity, culture and politics of your world.
Don’t just hire someone who has read the case studies. Hire someone who has actually improved something in a university.
If their hands aren’t dirty, they’re probably not going to fix your plumbing.
- Demand outcomes, not outputs
Don’t let anyone wow you with a list of deliverables. Ask a much simpler question: what will actually be different for students, staff or the institution when this project is finished?
Then measure it.
And no, a workshop, a strategy document or a 200-page report doesn’t automatically count as impact.
- Focus on tasks, not titles
Before redesigning the organisational chart, work out what actually needs to happen.
Which activities improve the student experience? Which ones increase enrolments? Which reduce attrition? Which help staff do their jobs better?
Start with the work that needs doing. Design around the tasks and outcomes, not the hierarchy.
- Software last, not first
If a consultant arrives talking about platforms before understanding your processes, be cautious.
Technology should enable change, not define it. First understand the problem. Then work out how to solve it. Only then decide which technology might help.
And just because someone has put the word AI in a presentation doesn’t mean you’ve got a strategy.
- Win now, build for later
Real transformation needs a long-term roadmap, but it also needs some early wins.
Ask for both.
Identify the changes that could make a meaningful difference now, with relatively little effort, and get moving while the bigger strategy takes shape.
Quick wins build confidence, create momentum and demonstrate that the project is actually delivering something. They also buy a little goodwill for the harder, longer-term work ahead.
Final thought
Universities are complex. Change is difficult. But that doesn’t mean you need to outsource your common sense.
The next time someone walks into your office with a major transformation proposal, ask them to talk you through the first week.
What happens in week one? What will students notice? What will staff be doing differently? What will your local community see?
If they can answer those questions clearly, with practical detail, you’re probably onto something.
If the answer involves another workshop, a discovery phase and a 300-slide presentation, perhaps it’s time to ask a few more questions.
Because real change isn’t about having the biggest vision, the fanciest terminology or the most impressive consulting firm in the room. It’s about making things genuinely better.
Your university deserves that. So do your students, your staff and your community.
And frankly, so does the consulting profession.
Mark Pettitt is the Founder and CEO of Edified – consultants dedicated exclusively to the business of education. For more information, Mark can be contacted via email.
