Realize that outside consultants never have State Farm‘s best interest in mind. They are a cancer that we willing let into our company. Some of them have been with us for YEARS – to the point that we don’t even realize that they are externals – and they overhear, and report back to the their mothership about what is going on within SF, what we are working on, and what we might need (to buy).
They make the most money when they cause complete chaos. The ones that come in and implement a grand new architecture or platform, or even a new tool, that never seems to quite work correctly, needs additional patches, needs additional configurations… requires us to be continually dependent on them, thus making them more money. I have worked with a lot of these technical consultants, and I’ve gotten to know them quite well on a personal level. It has never been in their interest to completely help us. They will implement a little tweak here, or a little fix there, and then say “let’s see what that does over the weekend“. They like to use the size of our company has both a flattering comment and a reason why they’re not able to ever completely implement anything correctly within our company.
The external EOM consultants were even worse. They were inflicted on us by executive management, with the understanding that we were going to implement what they suggested, no matter what. You either implemented EOM, or you were out. The consultants did not differentiate the different kinds of work that comes in, just the types of people. They did their time studies, and came up with the average times the work should be done based on the person/job class doing the work, not the type of work that was coming in. They then went in and implemented EOM each of the offices, hanging the signs that included the “valley of despair” metric which indicated that people would have to eventually “just get over it.” In the evenings the SF managers would all rub elbows with the consultants and get all chummy, and get completely manipulated by the consultants at fancy restaurants over fancy meals. The consultants were very good master manipulators of our SF management to the point that they no longer questioned EOM or anything that the consultants were recommending or doing. Then came the promotions. Just about everyone that worked on the implementation of EOM wind up getting a promotion. They called themselves Six Sigma ninjas, while turning both our income and outflow departments completely upside down (called a “transition period”). It was the most egregious example of the Peter Principal I’ve ever seen.
And now? Now our customers are going through the valley of despair. Unlike other large companies, we don’t sell a product… We sell a promise. We promise to provide outstanding claim service in the time of need, to “make life right“. But in a race to the bottom, we provide no better service than the competition. Which leaves only one deciding factor ... price. (And maybe the ability to interact with us via the Internet, which also lags behind.)
This is not a long-term winning formula, no matter how many employees we let go.