What Remains When the Consultants Leave?
The Value Paradox | Part III
Why lasting transformation depends on what organisations can do without external support.
There is a particular ceremony associated with the completion of a consulting engagement.
The final presentation is delivered. The recommendations are accepted. The implementation report is signed off. Perhaps a photograph is taken to commemorate the occasion.
There are acknowledgements, expressions of appreciation, and assurances that the work will make a meaningful difference.
The consultants pack their belongings, close their assignments, and move on to the next engagement.
And the organisation returns to work.
For a while, everything may appear to be going according to plan.
The new system continues operating. Employees follow the revised procedures. Managers refer to the dashboards developed during implementation. The strategy remains prominently displayed in the organisation’s planning documents.
Then ordinary organisational life begins to intervene.
A senior manager is transferred. An experienced employee resigns. A budget is reduced. A technology requires updating. An unforeseen problem emerges that was never anticipated in the original implementation plan.
The organisation must make decisions, but the people who designed the intervention are no longer there to guide them.
Perhaps employees know how to operate the system but not how to modify it. Perhaps the strategy explains what should be achieved but offers little guidance when circumstances change. Or perhaps the organisation has inherited the solution without developing the authority or confidence to manage its future.
This is a hypothetical scenario, but the underlying problem is familiar across organisational transformation.
It is not confined to consultancy. Similar challenges arise when development partners conclude their programmes, technical assistance teams withdraw, technology vendors complete implementations, or internal transformation teams return to their regular responsibilities.
In each case, the original intervention may have delivered exactly what was promised. It may even have produced genuine improvements.
Yet the circumstances that made those improvements possible are not necessarily the same circumstances that will allow them to endure.
And that leaves us with a question that is often more difficult to answer than whether the project was completed successfully.
What remains when the people responsible for creating an improvement are no longer responsible for sustaining it?
The Third Question of Value
In the first article of The Value Paradox, I explored how different stakeholders can understand the value of an intervention differently.
What appears valuable to a funding organisation may not necessarily be recognised as valuable by the institution receiving support or the people using its services.
The second article examined another problem.
Even when organisations agree on what they want to achieve, completing the work does not establish that the intended benefits have materialised.
A system may be delivered without improving services. A strategy may be approved without changing decisions. Employees may receive training without changing how they work.
But suppose an intervention succeeds.
Costs decline. Services become more accessible. Processes become faster. Employees work more effectively.
These are meaningful achievements, and they deserve to be recognised as such.
Yet there is a difference between producing an improvement and establishing the conditions through which that improvement can continue.
In international development, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee recognises sustainability as a distinct evaluation criterion. It concerns whether the net benefits of an intervention continue, or are likely to continue, over time.
The word net matters.
A digital system may save employees time while demanding increasingly expensive technical support. A programme may continue operating while the resources required to maintain it steadily exceed the benefits it produces.
In both situations, the intervention may remain operational without necessarily remaining worthwhile.
There is also the question of relevance.
A strategy developed for one set of circumstances may become less useful as priorities change. A technology that once represented a significant improvement may eventually become an obstacle to further progress.
Sustainability cannot simply mean keeping the original solution alive indefinitely.
Sometimes, the ability to replace an outdated solution is precisely what demonstrates that an organisation has become more capable.
The more meaningful question, then, is whether an organisation can continue producing worthwhile outcomes even as the circumstances around it change.
This distinction becomes clearer when we examine what happens to interventions long after their initial implementation.
When a Project Becomes Infrastructure
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Estonia faced a problem familiar to governments around the world.
Public institutions possessed information, but their systems were not necessarily capable of exchanging it efficiently. Different agencies maintained separate databases, and information moved through institutional boundaries that made coordination cumbersome.
Digitising individual departments could improve their internal operations, but it would not automatically solve the wider problem of communication between them.
Estonia needed more than another government database. It needed a way for different information systems to exchange information securely while allowing participating institutions to retain responsibility for their own data.
The solution became known as X-Road.
Its national deployment began in December 2001, following development involving Estonia’s public institutions and private technical expertise. The original procurement was awarded to AS Assert, with Cybernetica among the subcontractors contributing to the system’s architecture and security.
X-Road provided a foundation through which separate systems could communicate. Rather than requiring government information to be consolidated into one enormous database, it enabled participating organisations to exchange information through a shared technical and organisational environment.
Today, Estonia’s national implementation is known as X-tee, while X-Road refers to the underlying technology developed through international cooperation.
But the most interesting part of this story is not simply that Estonia developed a functioning digital platform.
It is what happened afterwards.
The technology continued evolving.
Estonia and Finland formalised cooperation in 2013. The core source code was made openly available during 2015 and 2016. In 2017, the two countries established the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions, or NIIS, to provide a more enduring arrangement for developing the technology.
NIIS subsequently took responsibility for core software development, while Estonia’s Information System Authority continued administering the country’s national X-tee environment.
What began as a technical solution acquired institutions, responsibilities, development arrangements, and a wider community capable of supporting its continued evolution.
The project became infrastructure.
And that infrastructure developed an institutional life beyond the original implementation.
There is an important qualification.
Estonia did not eliminate external technical expertise. Private technology providers continued participating in the wider ecosystem. It would therefore be misleading to present X-Road as a straightforward story of consultants delivering a solution, transferring everything to government, and disappearing.
The more useful lesson is different.
Sustainability did not require external expertise to disappear. It required arrangements through which the technology could continue to be governed, maintained, and developed.
An institution does not necessarily need to possess every technical skill internally. But it must understand the system it relies upon, the responsibilities it retains, the relationships through which it operates, and the decisions required to secure its future.
X-Road’s continued development does not prove that Estonia has solved every challenge associated with digital government. Nor does it establish that its approach can be reproduced elsewhere without difficulty.
What it illustrates is that a technological intervention can become the foundation for further institutional development when its continued operation is supported by appropriate arrangements.
The original achievement was not simply the creation of a platform. It was also the development of the conditions through which that platform could remain useful.
And this is where the story of sustainability becomes more complicated.
Because while some interventions gradually become embedded in the institutions they were designed to support, others remain dependent on the conditions under which they were introduced.
When Support Outlasts Ownership
A different experience emerged from Zambia’s education sector.
The country’s Primary Reading Programme was introduced to improve literacy teaching in primary schools, including through the use of local languages.
The programme received support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development between 1999 and 2005. It involved changes to teaching approaches, learning materials, and teacher development.
Years later, researchers Charity Lengwe Meki Kombe and Chaya Herman examined what had happened to the programme after donor support ended.
Their 2017 study found that it had been poorly sustained, with many elements substantially altered or discontinued.
The researchers identified several contributing factors, including programme design, stakeholder ownership and motivation, resource availability, monitoring and evaluation, school conditions, and changes in the wider policy environment.
One finding is particularly relevant.
The researchers cautioned that innovations requiring inputs and activities beyond the socioeconomic capacity of their intended beneficiaries may prove difficult to sustain.
This raises an uncomfortable question.
What happens when an intervention is designed around resources that the receiving institution cannot reasonably maintain?
A programme may function effectively while externally funded materials, training, technical support, and monitoring are available. But if those resources cannot be replaced or incorporated into routine institutional arrangements, the programme may become increasingly difficult to sustain.
The problem is not necessarily that the intervention was poorly conceived or that the people involved lacked commitment.
It may be that the operating conditions required for success were never sufficiently secured beyond the period of external support.
The Zambia study also identified what the researchers described as a project mentality, where attitudes towards externally supported programmes could undermine ownership and commitment.
This is especially revealing.
An intervention can be formally introduced into an institution without becoming something the institution genuinely regards as its own responsibility.
It may remain, in practice, somebody else’s project.
There are limits to what we should conclude from this case.
The research does not establish that the programme achieved nothing, nor does it demonstrate that donor withdrawal alone caused its subsequent difficulties. And a donor-supported education programme is not equivalent to a conventional management-consulting engagement.
Nevertheless, the sustainability problem is transferable.
An intervention can improve performance while remaining dependent on conditions that the receiving organisation cannot reproduce.
The contrast with Estonia is useful precisely because the two cases are so different.
Estonia illustrates how governance arrangements can support the continued development of an intervention. Zambia demonstrates how resource constraints, programme design, and institutional ownership can affect the continuation of externally supported activities.
The lesson is not that technology succeeds where education fails.
It is that the continuation of benefits depends on more than the quality of the original intervention.
Teaching Someone to Fish Is Only the Beginning
There is a familiar proverb about the difference between giving someone a fish and teaching them how to fish.
Its appeal is straightforward.
Providing the fish addresses an immediate need. Teaching the skill creates the possibility of meeting that need independently.
The distinction is frequently invoked in discussions about development, education, and capacity building.
But when applied to institutions, the proverb feels incomplete.
What happens when the person who learned to fish leaves the village? What happens when the equipment breaks, the river changes course, or the community grows?
An individual skill may be valuable without being sufficient to sustain an entire community.
The village needs more than someone who knows how to fish.
It may need shared knowledge, maintained equipment, agreed responsibilities, access to resources, and ways of adapting when circumstances change.
The same reasoning applies to organisations.
Training employees to operate a system may address an immediate capability gap. But if only two employees understand its essential functions, the organisation remains vulnerable to their departure.
A comprehensive operating manual may preserve valuable knowledge. Yet if it is never incorporated into routine practice, it may become little more than an archived document.
A strategy may identify the right priorities without providing the authority, incentives, or resources needed to act upon them.
This is why knowledge transfer and institutional capability should not be treated as interchangeable.
Knowledge can be transferred to individuals.
Institutional capability requires that knowledge to become usable through organisational arrangements that extend beyond those individuals.
This involves who makes decisions, how problems are identified, how employees learn from experience, and how responsibilities are maintained when people change roles.
In that sense, the most valuable intervention may not simply teach an organisation how to operate the solution it has received.
It may strengthen the organisation’s ability to understand and respond to the next problem.
And there is evidence that this distinction matters beyond the public sector.
Sustaining the Ability to Improve
At AstraZeneca’s Turbuhaler production unit in Sweden, researchers Bonnie Poksinska and Dag Swartling examined a Lean improvement programme through a longitudinal study spanning nine years.
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The organisation had introduced Lean practices to improve manufacturing performance. Over the longer transformation journey, the researchers documented substantial improvements in productivity and quality performance.
But the more interesting finding concerned how the improvement programme evolved.
Early attempts to introduce standardised work encountered resistance when procedures developed with external consultants did not adequately involve the operators expected to use them.
The organisation subsequently changed its approach.
Employees became more directly involved in developing and refining working methods. Teams assumed greater responsibility for daily operations, while managers increasingly focused on supporting and coaching employees rather than simply directing activities.
As these practices matured, improvement became more firmly embedded in the organisation’s everyday operations.
The researchers distinguished between two forms of sustainability.
They called the ability to maintain achieved results first-order sustainability.
They described the ability to keep the improvement programme itself alive as second-order sustainability.
The distinction is particularly useful.
Imagine a hospital reducing average patient waiting times from ninety minutes to fifty-five minutes.
If it maintains that improvement over several years, it has achieved something worthwhile.
But suppose patient demand increases, staffing patterns change, or new services are introduced. The original process may no longer be adequate.
An organisation capable of sustaining improvement should be able to recognise the emerging problem, examine its causes, and adapt its processes rather than automatically requiring another externally led transformation.
The first form of sustainability concerns the persistence of an improvement.
The second concerns the persistence of the ability to improve.
The AstraZeneca study is not evidence that all consultants should withdraw after implementation, nor is it a controlled comparison proving which particular practices caused every observed result.
Its value lies in showing how improvement can become embedded in the ordinary responsibilities and behaviours of an organisation.
At that point, the organisation is no longer simply preserving what was introduced.
It is developing the capability to change what was introduced when change becomes necessary.
This brings us to a practical difficulty that is often concealed by the formalities of project completion.
When Is an Organisation Ready to Take Ownership?
How should an organisation know whether it is ready for the consultants to leave?
The conventional answer often involves a handover checklist.
Have the documents been submitted? Has the training been completed? Have the operating procedures been approved? Have the designated employees received access to the system?
These are reasonable requirements.
But they are largely evidence that a transfer process has occurred.
They do not necessarily demonstrate that the organisation can exercise the responsibilities it has inherited.
A hospital may have received training on a digital system without having anyone capable of resolving a significant operational problem. A government department may possess a strategy without having an established process for reviewing priorities when budgets change. A manufacturing business may have adopted new procedures without giving employees the authority to improve them.
A more meaningful assessment would examine what happens when the organisation must act without the implementation team.
Who is accountable when performance deteriorates? Can employees diagnose routine problems and escalate unfamiliar ones? Are the necessary resources available through ordinary budgets rather than temporary project allocations?
Can the organisation replace key personnel without losing essential knowledge? Does it understand its contractual and technical dependencies?
And perhaps most importantly, can it identify when the original solution is no longer appropriate?
These questions suggest that handover should be demonstrated through operational capability, not merely documented through administrative completion.
Consider a hypothetical hospital preparing to assume responsibility for a newly implemented patient-management system.
Before handover, its internal team might be asked to manage a simulated system disruption, revise a routine workflow, investigate a reporting discrepancy, and explain how a future upgrade would be evaluated.
The consultant remains available to observe and support, but the hospital’s team leads the response.
Such an exercise would not guarantee that every future challenge could be managed independently. It would, however, provide stronger evidence of readiness than a signed training attendance sheet.
This also changes when sustainability should be considered.
If institutional ownership is discussed only during the final weeks of an engagement, the organisation may have too little time to develop the capabilities it needs.
Responsibilities must be introduced, practised, tested, and progressively transferred throughout implementation.
A consultant should not simply ask whether the client has received the necessary knowledge.
The more demanding question is whether the client has demonstrated the ability to use it.
The Difference Between Dependence and Partnership
At this point, an obvious conclusion might be that consultants should make their clients completely independent.
But that would be too simplistic.
Organisations rarely possess every capability they require internally.
Hospitals depend on specialist equipment manufacturers. Businesses rely on external technology providers. Governments procure expertise that would be expensive or impractical to maintain permanently within the civil service.
There are sound reasons for these arrangements.
The problem is not dependence itself.
It is dependence that an organisation cannot adequately understand, manage, afford, or change.
Consider two hospitals operating similar digital systems.
Both rely on external vendors for specialised maintenance.
The first understands its contractual arrangements, retains appropriate access to its data, possesses sufficient internal expertise to manage routine operations, and can evaluate alternative suppliers if necessary.
The second cannot modify basic workflows without the vendor, lacks adequate documentation, and has limited understanding of the costs or consequences of changing providers.
Both hospitals are externally dependent.
But they are not equally capable of governing that dependence.
The distinction has financial implications.
A system that appears inexpensive to implement may become costly if every minor adjustment requires a separately billed intervention. Conversely, employing a permanent internal team for highly specialised work needed only occasionally may be an inefficient use of resources.
Sustainability therefore requires judgement about which capabilities should be retained internally, which can reasonably be procured externally, and how the organisation preserves sufficient control over the relationship.
The initial investment is only part of the economic decision. Ongoing maintenance, retraining, upgrades, replacement costs, and contractual obligations also shape the value that remains.
This is why a sustainable solution need not be self-sufficient.
It needs to be governable.
When the Next Engagement Begins with a New Problem
Perhaps this also invites us to reconsider what a successful consulting relationship should become.
A consultant may spend one or two years helping an organisation diagnose a problem, develop a strategy, implement a solution, and establish the arrangements needed to sustain it.
During that period, reliance on external expertise may be entirely reasonable. The consultant understands the intervention, the organisation is learning, and responsibilities are gradually transferred as new capabilities become operational.
But once the original problem has been addressed, the relationship should be allowed to evolve.
Suppose a consultancy helps a hospital implement an electronic medical record system.
The hospital eventually becomes capable of managing routine operations, maintaining its data, and making informed decisions about the technology.
That should be regarded as an achievement.
It does not mean the hospital will never require external expertise again.
The new digital foundation may reveal opportunities for interoperability, clinical analytics, patient-flow redesign, or more sophisticated resource planning.
These may justify entirely new engagements.
But the justification should be the value of addressing a new problem, not the preservation of an old dependency.
The consultant’s contribution evolves as the client’s capabilities mature.
And sometimes, the most appropriate next engagement is no engagement at all.
An organisation that can continue independently may be demonstrating precisely the kind of capability the original intervention was intended to create.
The principle is simple.
The next engagement should be earned through a new opportunity to create value, not secured by ensuring that the previous problem remains unresolved.
What Remains Is the Real Legacy
We began with the familiar ceremony of project completion.
The final report is accepted. The strategy is approved. The system becomes operational. The consultants leave.
These moments matter.
They represent real work, expertise, investment, and effort. Without successful delivery, many improvements would never become possible.
But across this series, a more demanding understanding of value has gradually emerged.
First, value must be understood in relation to the people and institutions expected to benefit from it.
Second, value must be demonstrated through meaningful improvements rather than inferred from completed activities.
And third, those improvements must be capable of enduring beyond the circumstances that originally produced them.
Estonia’s X-Road illustrates how governance arrangements can enable a technological intervention to continue developing beyond its original implementation.
Zambia’s Primary Reading Programme demonstrates how resource constraints, programme design, and institutional ownership can affect the sustainability of externally supported activities.
AstraZeneca’s experience suggests that organisations can move beyond maintaining improvements towards sustaining the capability to keep improving.
These cases do not share the same objectives, sectors, or operating environments. Nor do they establish that every successful transformation must follow a single model.
But they point towards a common principle.
An intervention should leave behind more than the immediate evidence of its own completion.
It should leave behind the conditions through which its benefits can continue.
A strategy may eventually become outdated. A technology may require replacing. Employees may move on, leadership may change, and the organisation may confront problems that nobody anticipated during implementation.
The ultimate question is whether it can respond.
Perhaps this is the most meaningful legacy of a successful intervention.
Not simply that the organisation performs better while external support is available.
But that it becomes better equipped to recognise problems, make decisions, mobilise resources, and adapt when circumstances change.
The true test of transformation is not whether the organisation can continue doing what the consultants taught it to do. It is whether the organisation can decide what to do when those lessons are no longer enough.
The consultants may have left.
The organisation should not have lost its ability to move forward.
Author’s Note
This is Part III of The Value Paradox, a three-part series examining how organisations define, realise, and sustain value across private enterprise, public institutions, and organisational transformation.
The interpretations presented here are my own, informed by published research, official documentation, and established thinking on sustainability, organisational learning, and capacity development.
The opening consulting scenario and hypothetical hospital examples are illustrative. The discussions of Estonia’s X-Road, Zambia’s Primary Reading Programme, and AstraZeneca’s Lean improvement programme draw on publicly documented cases. These interventions differ in nature and should not all be interpreted as conventional management-consulting engagements.
The distinction between sustaining improvements and sustaining the capacity to improve is drawn from the research of Bonnie Poksinska and Dag Swartling. The broader discussion of institutional ownership and capability is a synthesis of established ideas rather than a claim to an original academic framework.
The views expressed are personal and do not represent those of any organisation with which I am or have been associated.
References & Further Reading
- OECD (2021). Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/applying-evaluation-criteria-thoughtfully_543e84ed-en.html
- OECD-DAC (2019). Better Criteria for Better Evaluation: Revised Evaluation Criteria Definitions and Principles for Use. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2019/12/better-criteria-for-better-evaluation_f7a307eb/15a9c26b-en.pdf
- Estonian Information System Authority. Data Exchange Layer X-tee. https://www.ria.ee/en/state-information-system/data-exchange-platforms/data-exchange-layer-x-tee
- Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions. History of NIIS and X-Road History. https://www.niis.org/history and https://x-road.global/xroad-history
- Kombe, C. L. M., & Herman, C. (2017). Can Education Innovations Be Sustained after the End of Donor Funding? The Case of a Reading Intervention Programme in Zambia. Educational Review, 69(5), 533–553. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2016.1265917
- Poksinska, B., & Swartling, D. (2018). From Successful to Sustainable Lean Production: The Case of a Lean Prize Award Winner. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 29(9–10), 996–1011. https://doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2018.1486539
The Value Paradox | End of Series
