[Sigia-l] Beyond Chargeback: Accountable Consulting

[Peter Merholz]

Back at the 2002 IA Summit, Lou Rosenfeld promoted a shift in how
enterprises structure their internal IA consulting.

http://louisrosenfeld.com/presentations/020316-ASIS%26T.ppt

Within it he argued for a chargeback accounting model, where businesses pay
for premium IA services, in an effort to demonstrate the value of IA within
the organization.  

(If I'm not mistaken, he also wrote about it in the 2nd Edition of the Polar
Bear, which I seem to have misplaced.)

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about internal consulting, as I've been
interacting with a number of Big Corporate Clients who are struggling with
valuing user experience.

One method is free consulting. This inevitably causes problems, because user
experience types are simply seen as free resources that can be used
willy-nilly. This leads to the outcome that UX resources are used on
projects that don't have any real chance of seeing the light of day, but
such use is not considered a waste, since the resource is "free".

Lou's model of Chargeback Consulting addresses this in part, making sure
that the Lines of Business (LOB) utilizing the UX resource are serious about
it, because it's going to cost them money.

There are problems with just doing chargeback though:

a) companies are encouraged to look at external UX vendors that might prove
cheaper than internal, ruining the centrality and coherence that comes with
using internal teams

A key and insurmountable problem with both free and chargeback consulting is
that the UX people have no real 'skin in the game.' I'm sure everyone on
this list has been told to design something that, when we've employed our
methods wisely, we realize is foolish and a waste of time and resources. We
tell this to the Business Owner of the project, and you know what?

The Business Owner doesn't care. And the Business Owner wants you to do what
s/he tells you to do.

And you can state your case until your blue in the face, but it won't
matter. Why?

Because the Business Owner has P&L responsibility, has accountability for
the success of this project, and so what the Business Owner says, goes. The
UX resource, even if they're being paid through "chargeback", has no
substantial say, because it's not their butt on the line.

This ties into the reality that companies see UX as a "cost of doing
business", and not an investment. As a "cost", companies desire to keep the
expenditure to a minimum.

In order for UX to be seen as an investment in the business -- that our
efforts actually return value -- we need to be made accountable. We need to
have our performance tied to metrics that we can influence, and that have an
impact on the business.

This will:
a) Allow us to reap rewards from our successful efforts
b) Give us a foundation upon which to dispute foolish business moves,
because we also have 'skin in the game'

In order for accountable consulting to work, a fairly sophisticated metrics
assessment and analysis framework needs to be set up.

I'm wondering: has any enterprise done this? Does any enterprise make their
internal consultants *accountable* for the success of the project in
concrete ways? How so?

--peter