“Needs Assessments” Are Dead. That’s a Question.

It’s a known factoid that consultants love “needs assessments.”

The question is, does anyone else?

Behind closed doors, what clients call “Phase 1 Needs Assessments” (as if they are part of the ongoing project) go by a less euphemistic term: “paid business development.”

Companies regularly pay between $20,000 and $500,000 for needs assessments, depending upon the breadth of the scope of the assessment.

For what?

To be told exactly what the company’s problem is?

Needs assessments are great at determining what questions your team should be asking, and what data you should be using.

The thing is, they don’t solve the problems you have, which are that your team either doesn’t have the know-how or political willpower to get those questions asked and that data used.

So you spend all that money, find out what the people you pay good money to should have been able to tell you during the normal course of their job, and then when the consultants leave, they leave you with lots of great knowledge… but that same team that couldn’t execute before.

What a needs assessment won’t get you is removal of the political obstacles that keep your people from doing their jobs, managers who can instill trust, leaders with the courage to make the tough calls, or a culture in which transparent communication will be rewarded.

All they’ll do is convince you that you need the consultants to come back and execute.

Eventually leaving you with your current team + a shadow organization of consultants doing the same work, only—in theory—better… and more expensively.

Great.

Watching last week’s news, I wondered: what if the U.S. government had a needs assessment done?

Is there any doubt that the resulting document would:

• Put politics aside?
• Recommend term limits for Congressmen?
• Acknowledge challenges stemming from having old school warriors leading new school wars?
• Recommend a re-education of… the entire population… of the rationale for a 3-branch, 2-house, system of governance?
• Recommend a change to lobbying practices?
• Recommend a different press communication strategy?
• Be totally useless, since the challenge in government isn’t lack of awareness of the issues, but the lack of willingness to implement them?

In today’s market, where every dollar is critically important and results are king, is there still space in organizations for expensive, outside needs assessments? I mean, beyond the sales cycle?

Tagged as: consulting, Leadership, training