Who should review a consulting engagement afterwards?

Somebody who did not commission it, on a date fixed before the work starts. A sponsor who told the board the engagement would work cannot credibly assess whether it did.

12 Questions Before You Hire a Consultant

Q: When should knowledge transfer be agreed?

Before signature, and it should run throughout the engagement rather than arriving as documents at the end. Australia and France require knowledge-transfer clauses in every government consultancy contract.

Stagnation Slaughters. Strategy Saves. Speed Scales.

Twelve questions, each with the answer that should worry you, because a list of questions without that second half is a list anybody can survive. The questions are grounded in the only substantial body of evidence about what makes consulting engagements work, which comes from an audit office rather than from the industry. The worrying answers are mine, and they are the part you cannot look up.

What do buyers say actually works?

Six things, none of which is about the consultant. The United Kingdom’s National Audit Office asked fifty officials across thirteen departments what made their successful engagements succeed, and every recurring answer described something the buyer did rather than something the supplier brought.

The ranked list from that November 2025 report, by how often each was named: clear scope and requirements, clear outcomes and deliverables, using consultants only where the expertise is genuinely required, blended teams of internal and external people, effective contract management, and knowledge transfer.

Two things about that list are worth pausing on. Nothing in it concerns firm selection, methodology or brand. And the same survey found 86 per cent of officials considered consultants a valuable contribution, with 40 per cent calling them extremely valuable, so this is not a hostile population reporting that nothing works. It is an experienced population reporting that what works is on the buyer’s side of the table.

The twelve questions below are built from that, from the report’s eleven numbered lessons, and from specific practices it documents at individual departments. One caveat on transfer: this is British central government, and the findings concern buying behaviour rather than public procurement law, which is why they apply to a private mid-market purchase.

Before you buy: three questions

These three go to your own organisation rather than to any supplier, and asking them first eliminates a meaningful share of consulting purchases before a proposal exists. The audit office’s first lesson is to start from the assumption that your own staff are the best use of resources.

1. What could our own people do, and why can they not do this? The British government’s own consultancy guidance says departments should exhaust internal options first, and the Ministry of Defence now requires teams to submit a business case demonstrating they considered internal staffing before hiring anybody.

The answer that should worry you: “They are too busy.” That is a capacity problem, and a consultant is an expensive way to buy capacity. The audit office found consultants add least value when used as temporary workers during busy periods.

2. How many firms are we actually going to ask? The Department of Health and Social Care requires a business case to be able to expect three or more competitors to bid before it proceeds.

The answer that should worry you: “We already know who we want.” Consultants told the audit office that rushed engagements signal a preferred vendor, which disincentivises everybody else from bidding properly, so you end up with one real proposal and two written to lose.

3. Have we hired somebody for this exact thing before? The report’s eleventh lesson is to avoid becoming dependent by repeatedly using external consultants for the same tasks.

The answer that should worry you: “Yes, and they were good.” If the same gap recurs, you are renting a capability you should own, and each engagement makes the next one likelier rather than less likely.

Fifty officials were asked what made their successful engagements succeed. Every recurring answer described something the buyer did. Nothing in the list concerns firm selection, methodology or brand.

About the work: three questions

Now to the supplier. The audit office’s fourth lesson is to strengthen your role as an intelligent client by ensuring contracts focus on outcomes and outputs rather than inputs, and these three are how you test whether a proposal has done that.

4. What outcome will exist at the end that does not exist now? Not a deliverable list. A state of the world. The distinction between outputs and inputs is the one the report returns to most often.

The answer that should worry you: anything measured in activity. A workshop series, a diagnostic, an alignment. Those are things that will happen, not things that will be true afterwards, and a proposal built from them cannot fail.

5. What are the roles, targets and timelines, and will they be agreed before signature? The fifth lesson says to define all of these clearly before signing the contract, which is the sentence that gives away how often it does not happen.

The answer that should worry you: “We will work that out in the mobilisation phase.” Mobilisation is after signature, when your leverage has gone. Everything you want in writing has to be in writing while you can still walk away.

6. What would make you decline this engagement? The most useful question of the twelve and the one nobody asks.

The answer that should worry you: “Nothing, we can help with anything.” A firm that cannot describe work it would turn down has no scope, and a proposal with no boundary is a proposal to do whatever comes up at your expense.

About the people: three questions

The audit office’s sixth lesson concerns integrating consultants into blended teams, which its own survey found to be among the most commonly named features of successful engagements. These three questions establish who you are actually getting, how they will work alongside your people, and what that will cost you in internal time.

7. Which named individuals, at what committed percentage, in the contract? Names and percentages, not roles and grades. Every firm resists this and the degree of resistance is itself informative.

The answer that should worry you: “We staff flexibly based on need.” That is true and it means the senior people you met are being sold into three other pitches this month.

8. Who from our side sits inside the team, and doing what? Blended teams appear repeatedly in the report as the pattern that works, and one department described using a shared mission to motivate a firm beyond the letter of its contract.

The answer that should worry you: “We will work independently and report progress.” That is an output-purchase rather than a capability-build, which is sometimes exactly right and should be a decision rather than a default.

9. How much of our people’s time does this require, and have we asked them? The guidance tells buyers to be honest and specific with consultants about how much time internal staff can dedicate. Almost nobody checks in advance.

The answer that should worry you: silence, or an estimate from somebody other than the people whose time it is. Engagements fail when consultants cannot get access to the individuals they need, and that is a scheduling problem you create before the work starts.

About the end: three questions

The audit office is blunt that officials routinely leave these questions until the engagement is already finishing, by which point both sides have moved on to the next problem and the conversation gets skipped or shortened. All three of them belong in the contract instead.

10. What knowledge transfers, how, and starting when? The report is explicit that knowledge transfer should not be a handover of documents at the end but an active process throughout. Australia and France now require knowledge-transfer clauses in every government consultancy engagement, and the Australian finance department publishes model clauses departments can paste in.

The answer that should worry you: “We will provide full documentation at closure.” Documentation is not transfer. Ask which of your named people will be able to run this alone, and how their competence gets demonstrated before the final invoice.

11. What will we measure, and could the measure show failure? The report warns that poorly designed indicators encourage consultants to deliver to the indicator rather than to the intended outcome.

The answer that should worry you: a measure the firm controls, or one that cannot go the wrong way. If every plausible version of the engagement produces a green light, you have bought a reporting exercise.

12. Who reviews this afterwards, and on what date? The eighth lesson is to use post-project performance analysis to shape future work, and the report notes this rarely happens.

The answer that should worry you: the sponsor. Somebody who told the board this would work cannot credibly assess whether it did. Name an independent reviewer and a date before the engagement starts, because after it ends nobody will.

How do you actually use the twelve?

Send them in advance, ask them in two sittings, and write the answers down. A list fired across a table in one meeting produces prepared responses to the first four and fatigue by the eighth, which is exactly the outcome a firm hoping to avoid scrutiny would design if it could.

Four practices that make the difference between a list and a process.

Send the questions before the meeting. This feels like giving away your advantage and does the opposite. A firm that prepares proper answers gives you something to hold them to, and a firm that arrives unprepared for questions it received in writing has told you how the engagement will run.

Split them across two conversations. The first three go to your own people before any supplier is contacted. The remaining nine split naturally into the work and the people in one meeting, and the ending in another. Nobody answers twelve consecutive questions well, including you.

Write down the answers verbatim, and circulate them. Not notes on impressions. The words. Six weeks later, when the proposal has been rewritten twice, the only reliable record of what was promised is what somebody typed in the room, and the difference between the answer and the eventual contract is the most useful document you will have.

Ask the same questions of at least two firms. The answers are only interpretable against each other. A vague response to question four sounds acceptable in isolation and looks obviously evasive next to a specific one, which is the cheapest form of benchmarking available in a purchase where nothing else is comparable.

One thing to skip. Do not score the answers on a matrix. Scoring converts judgment into arithmetic and produces a defensible-looking result that nobody believes, and the decision will be made on the answers to two or three of the twelve anyway. Work out which two or three matter most for your situation before you start.

Who should this article send away?

Anyone who will not act on a bad answer. Twelve questions asked of a firm you have already chosen is an expensive ritual, and the only thing that makes any of this work is a genuine willingness to stop, which most buyers discover they do not have around question six.

The test is simple and worth applying honestly before the meeting: if the firm answers question six badly, will you still sign? If the answer is yes, save everybody the afternoon.

The commonest reason buyers cannot stop is that the decision was made before the process started, usually by a sponsor who has already described the engagement to somebody senior. That is a governance problem rather than a procurement one, and no question list touches it.

Where to go instead, and all of it is better than this article. The audit office report is free, thorough and written by people whose job is to find out what went wrong; read the eleven lessons directly. The accompanying good-practice guide is aimed at buyers rather than commentators. And Australia’s model knowledge-transfer clauses are published, drafted by a finance ministry, and considerably better than anything I would write for the same purpose.

Where does this break down?

Twelve questions cannot fix an evaluation problem. A capable firm will answer all twelve fluently, and telling a good answer from a well-delivered one requires knowing the domain, which is frequently the reason you are hiring somebody in the first place.

That circularity is real and I do not have a solution to it. The partial mitigation is that the worrying answers above are mostly structural rather than technical: a refusal to name individuals, a measure that cannot fail, a reviewer who commissioned the work. You can spot those without domain knowledge, which is why I have weighted the list toward them.

Three further limits. The evidence base is one document, deep rather than wide, and although it rests on 57 interviews and a survey across 13 departments it is a single audit office looking at one government. Its findings concern buying behaviour rather than procurement law, which is why I think they transfer to a private buyer, and that is my judgment rather than the report’s claim. And I have published buyer questions in several other articles on this site; this list consolidates them, so a regular reader will recognise perhaps half of it.

The claim I would keep: the six things experienced buyers named as the keys to success were all things the buyer controlled, and that finding should change how a company spends its preparation time relative to its selection time.

If the firm answers question six badly, will you still sign? If the answer is yes, save everybody the afternoon. Most buyers discover their unwillingness to stop somewhere around that question.

What I sell, and what I don’t

I don’t sell consulting. My employment contract doesn’t allow it, so there is no engagement waiting at the end of this article and no proposal coming. Two things here are commercial: I speak for a fee, and I sell books. Everything else, including the audit, is free, and it stays free because it has to be. If you have a proposal in front of you and want a second read on the answers you got, send it to my contact page.

About the Stagnation Assassin

Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books, The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.

The talk version asks a room which of the twelve they asked on their last engagement. The average is two, and both of them were about price. Formats and fee are on my speaking page.

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