Outsourcing

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A great boon for management consultants, but a chocolate starfish for anyone else.

Management consultancy textbooks will glowingly quote Anthony Burgess: “A sure sign of an amateur is too much detail to compensate for too little life”.

Management consultants aren’t generally much good with literature. Much less detail. This they take as a mandate to ignore the messy intractable details of a business process, and instead look at the big picture. A good rule of thumb, they say, is Pareto's 80/20 rule: 20% of the activities will consume 80% of the costs. 80% of the revenue will come from 20% of the clients. And so on.

Step one — undoubtedly right — leads to step 2: if we could only identify what that 80% is, we could relocate it to a cheaper means of production and bingo — easy cost savings.

What this misses

• it's low value, not no value.

See also

• Outsourcing
• Service level agreement
• Management consultant
• Subject matter expert
• Metrics
• ClauseHub: theory