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“Managing Expectations” - cliched business consultancy buzzword with some inarguable philosophical merit.

The Wall Street Journal reviews the book “The Management Myth” which amongst other criticisms, eschews the culture of freshly graduated consultants thrust into the position of formulaic hyper-analysis of large corporations with only academic experience in their tool belt.

In a reddit discussion, user thandar had this related anecdote to drive the point home:

I thought I’d include a case study from here in the UK I don’t wish to name the firm but they had a huge no. of field engineers to fix customers broken equipment in their homes. Management consultants came in and quickly spotted cost savings

1. Highly paid older engineers
2. High cost regional bases where the engineers came back to 2 or 3 times a day, these contained spares, repairs and the girls who handed out the calls

so the solution was,

1.  One national center - sell off the regional centers
2. Centralize call management, the engineers stayed out all day and communicated by mobile and PDA, no voice contact
3. Spares to be sent during the night to roadside boxes, the engineer would pick them up from there and fix the problem
4. Remove the older engineers from the field

All well and good, on paper a fantastic cost saving, however…

1. A lot of engineers quit because the never talked to anybody
2. The roadside stores were quickly targeted by local gangs and the contents stolen
3. The “first call” fix rate plummeted for two reasons :

a. All the engineers with good fault finding skills had left or been retired

b. It turns out the engineers were not just drinking coffee at base, they were talking to each other, stories about how they had fixed a new problem, and a valuable resource had been lost.

Eventually they scrapped the management “guru” and went back a step but a lot of what had been lost was irreplacable.