The pyramid is the problem, not the people

A consultancy pyramid is a pricing model dressed as an org chart. One partner, two managers, eight consultants. The partner sells, the managers manage, the consultants build. The client meets the partner and gets the consultants. Everyone involved is competent; the structure still loses the plot somewhere between the proposal and the code.

The problem is not how many people there are. It is where the judgement sits, and whether it still reaches the room when the decisions get made.

Where does the budget go?

The proposal is written by someone who has read the client’s situation closely and formed a view. That view lives in their head. It is transmitted to the delivery team as a slide deck and a kick-off call, which is to say it is not transmitted. The delivery team then re-discovers the problem, slowly, while being billed as if they already understood it.

Ask anyone who has sat inside a large programme which variable predicted the overrun. The answer tends to be the same: whether the understanding in the proposal reached the team that built it. When it did, the work came in near plan. When it did not, the number on the proposal turned out to be a fiction everyone had agreed to believe.

Why do firms keep the structure?

Margin. A senior’s judgement billed at senior rates is expensive; a senior’s judgement sold at senior rates and delivered at junior rates is a business model. The layering is not an accident of growth; it is the product.

It is also invisible from outside. A proposal does not say which of the people who wrote it will still be attached in four months, and by the time a client finds out, the budget is committed.

What do we do instead?

We make the hand-off a document rather than a conversation, and the team a term rather than an intention.

What we learn reading your problem is written down before anyone builds: the findings, the measure the work will be judged on, today’s number, and the plan. The build works from that document, and it is yours whoever builds. The team is named in the statement of work, and nobody joins or leaves it without your written consent.

That is a claim about what reaches the build and who answers for it, not about how many of us there are or who does which job. It matters because those other claims expire. A firm that sells its size, or promises that the person who sold the work will also do it, is selling something it has to defend against its own growth. A firm that writes its judgement down can hire without renegotiating a single promise.

How you check it

Ask any firm two questions before you sign.

Where is the understanding in this proposal written down, so that the people who build can work from it? And who, by name, is on the team, and what happens contractually if one of them is moved? A firm that cannot answer the first is selling you the pyramid. A firm that cannot answer the second is hoping you will not notice when it happens.

Ours are answered in writing, on every engagement, from the first message.