Commissioning as Governance: The Four Tests That Precede a Consultancy Award

Most disappointing consultancy engagements are not sabotaged in the proposal. They are seeded earlier, in a commissioning document that sounds ambitious but behaves ambiguously. By the time advisers respond, the firm has already framed the question. If that question conflates aspiration with instruction, the response will be polished, plausible and misaligned. The failure is then attributed to the consultancy, when the more useful inquiry concerns the quality of the brief.

This is not an argument for longer documents. It is an argument for treating commissioning as a governance act rather than an administrative precursor to procurement. A brief should allocate authority, define evidence, acknowledge internal capacity and force uncomfortable trade-offs into the open. Before a UK firm judges an adviser on the answer, it should judge itself on the question.

Test one: who can actually say yes?

The first audit question is deceptively simple. If the consultancy recommends a course of action, who has the authority to approve it? The document should distinguish between the sponsor who champions the work, the decision-maker who can commit the firm, and the budget holder who controls the funds. In many firms these are three different people, and the brief names none of them.

A commissioning document should also state what cannot be approved. Are there decisions reserved for the board, a parent company, an investment committee or a regulated function? If the answer is unclear, the consultancy will infer a decision landscape from meetings and tone. That inference may be wrong. The eventual recommendation may be sound but institutionally undeliverable.

A practical test is to write one sentence into the brief: ‘The decision this engagement is intended to inform will be taken by [role], on [date], using [forum].’ If the sentence cannot be completed without guessing, the brief is not ready.

Test two: what would count as evidence?

Commissioning documents often describe success in adjectives. The firm wants a ‘robust’ strategy, a ‘clear’ operating model or a ‘stronger’ commercial function. These are reasonable ambitions but poor instructions. They give the adviser no test of completion and give the client no basis for judgement beyond presentation quality.

A stronger brief specifies evidence. What artefact should exist at the end? Which decision should become easier? What baseline will be used? Which stakeholder group should be able to explain the conclusion without the consultant in the room? If the answer is a document, say so. If the answer is a changed decision process, say that too. The two require different work.

The evidence test should also include a rejection condition. What would cause the firm to conclude that the recommended path is not viable? A brief that cannot imagine a negative finding is not a brief; it is a request for validation. Advisers can usually tell the difference, and some will supply the validation rather than the evidence.

Test three: who will carry the work internally?

Consultancy engagements fail quietly when the client-side capacity assumed in the proposal does not exist. The brief may promise access to data, interviews with senior staff and fortnightly steering meetings. The diary may promise otherwise. When the work stalls, the adviser is blamed for pace while the firm has not released the people required to create it.

A commissioning document should name internal roles, not just departments. Who will own the work day to day? Who will resolve data access? Who will corral stakeholders? How many hours are realistically available, and from whom? If the honest answer is that no one has capacity until the next quarter, the brief should say so. An adviser can design around a stated constraint. Few can design around a constraint that has been omitted to preserve the appearance of readiness.

This is particularly important for ambitious UK firms operating with lean central teams. The consultancy may be specialist, but it is not a substitute for internal decision-making. The brief should make clear where the boundary lies between advice and execution.

Test four: what are you prepared to give up?

Every engagement trades speed, cost, scope and risk. Commissioning documents frequently ask for all four to improve simultaneously. The consultancy is then invited to pretend that they can. A better brief forces a ranking. If the firm must choose between a faster answer and a more certain one, which does it prefer? If it must choose between broader coverage and deeper evidence, where does it want the weight?

This is not a procurement formality. It is the point at which ambition becomes an instruction. A trade-off recorded in the brief gives the adviser permission to make sensible choices later. A trade-off left unstated will reappear as a complaint about scope, quality or cost.

A short audit before the proposal

The four tests can be run in less than an hour, before the document is issued. The sponsor, the intended decision-maker and the internal delivery lead should read the brief separately and score each test red, amber or green. Red means the brief cannot yet support a fair judgement of any response. Amber means the question is clear enough to invite dialogue but not yet clear enough to award. Green means the firm has given advisers a genuine question to answer.

The purpose is not to produce a perfect brief. It is to avoid commissioning a consultancy to resolve a question the firm has not yet articulated. A clear brief does not guarantee a good outcome, but it improves the quality of the contest between proposals. It also gives the firm a fairer basis on which to hold advisers to account. Before blaming the consultancy for answering the wrong question, UK firms should audit the question they asked.