The Work That Never Gets Done

How resource constraints keep organizations from tackling their most important priorities

I founded PSF Consulting so that I could leverage my years of experience in public sector finance to help mission-driven organizations make progress on their most difficult, most daunting challenges. Having worked in finance leadership positions within public sector entities, I understand the challenges associated with resource constraints. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the week to deal with everything that needs attention. At times, it felt that I only ever had time to react to what was on fire at that moment. We were all treading water, keeping business moving forward, just trying to stay afloat.

Progress on the really important work was slower than I would have liked because I only had time to chip away at it in between other projects and priorities that were more urgent, albeit less important. Some examples of the important work I’m talking about include implementing a system (not a spreadsheet) to meet the new lease accounting standards, reimplementing an underutilized module of the ERP, and creating a formalized system of internal controls that is integrated with our enterprise risk management strategy.

The beauty of consulting is that it can expand your capacity without a long-term commitment. You’re not adding headcount to your payroll. It’s a short-term commitment with a big payoff. But here’s the thing that has always been frustrating to me about working with consultants in the past: There’s a flurry of activity in a short period of time. We (the client) spend a lot of time gathering data and answering questions to help the consultant understand our organization and develop their recommendations. They take some time to synthesize the data, maybe ask some clarifying questions, then come back with recommendations. The consultant presents their recommendations, and the engagement concludes.

We might make some decisions about which ones we’re going to implement right away – we’ll call these the low hanging fruit. But the problem of not having enough time in the day hasn’t gone away. Many times, the rest of those recommendations sit on a shelf, collecting dust. We don’t implement them because we still don’t have capacity to implement them. Maybe some of the recommendations feel like they don’t quite fit our organization, so we dismiss them, even though making some small adjustments could make them feel tailor-made.

Recommendations are only valuable to the extent they are implemented by the organization. If a consultant brings forward a recommendation for a 100% solution, but very little of it gets implemented, the ROI is relatively small. If instead we work together to develop an 85% solution that feels achievable and nearly all of it gets implemented, we’re in a much better position. I first encountered this idea in Michael Wilkinson’s book, The Secrets of Facilitation, and I loved the way it helped me visualize why the gap between consulting recommendations and implementation can feel so frustrating.

Recommendations are only valuable to the extent they are implemented by the organization.

This lived experience has shaped PSF’s collaborative consulting philosophy. At PSF, we will partner with your organization. We bring our expertise and experience to the table, but you bring your organizational context, which is critical to developing the right solutions. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, we will work alongside you to develop recommendations together. And we’ll partner with you to help get the buy-in that’s needed from the people who are actually doing the work. In fact, we recommend that they play a part in developing the recommendations. Once we’ve developed recommendations that feel achievable, we can also partner with you on implementation. If you need help writing policies and procedures, analyzing data, selecting systems, or communicating changes, we’re here to help.

What important initiatives are sitting on the back burner for your organization because there simply isn’t enough capacity to move them forward? Sometimes the challenge isn’t knowing what needs to be done, it’s having the time, support and partnership needed to develop a plan and put it into action. If you’re facing a challenge like this, we’d welcome a conversation.