Consultants: the real reason it costs so much to build new subways in America
The most interesting thing about this article to me isn't the "spending too much on consultants" bit, it's the bit where the agencies in charge of budgets for these enormous projects no longer have staff that are capable of managing them, having outsourced that institutional capacity to consulting companies for far too long.This seems like a viciously difficult problem to solve to me. How do you hire someone for a city's transport agency who has the ability to manage a multi-billion dollar construction project? Anyone with those skills will surely be able to earn 10x more in the private sector.But without that talent in-house, even the consultants are frustrated (or at least the ones that actually want to deliver projects) because they don't get the answers they need from their customers in order to move ahead with projects.