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Comment by zebnyc | Hacker News Reader

My wife's company (large pharma in SSF starting with G) consulted with Mckinsey for "strategy and innovation". Mckinsey recommended

a) the company G move to Agile except that they didn't say how. So now every meeting/townhall/1:1 is filled with buzzwords. It is clear from the way she describes it, no one in the company understands what Agile means. Everybody talks about collaboration but they don't do any of the Agile rituals.

b) All of G's employees should move to an open office plan with non dedicated seats. You come in the morning and have to hunt around for a desk. If you have to go for a meeting in a conference room, you have to pack up all your stuff in your bag and go. When your meeting is over, it is time to start hunting again.

Morale amongst the rank-and-file is quite low.

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Similar story. McKinsey was brought in to a company I was working with. Their purpose was to improve management efficiency and morale, which were both quite poor because the CEO had no actual industry experience and had brought his friends on as senior executives, who similarly had no idea what they were doing. McKinsey interviewed everyone for three months, literally reading questions from a playbook, had their junior staff write up some recommendations, and then promptly disappeared while effecting zero actual change. The company went bankrupt shortly thereafter.

This is why management consulting has such a bad reputation in the tech community. On the other hand, McKinsey does do a pretty decent job of research and case studies since they’re able to work with so many prominent companies.

A thousand times, this.

In my experience, this stems from the shocking number of "Agile Coaches" lacking practical experience in any of the three main disciplines within a functioning product team (software engineering, product management, or design).

So while they can introduce the high-level rituals -- standups, retrospectives, and the like -- they are unable to teach battle magic: building code that can cope with changing user requirements, writing specifications that make sense to both stakeholders and engineers, and figuring out what problems we acutally need to solve to get people to buy and use the product.

Moreover, they undersell just how much an organization needs to adapt to actually leverage any of this.

The end result is exactly as you describe.

In my experience, companies that succeed with Agile practices are the ones that (a) constantly invest in their people; (b) delegate problems, not solutions; and (c) are ruthlessly rational, requiring that each new practice or idea pays its own rent.

Did the Mck guys handle any of the implementation? Because that sounds like the client took potentially valid recommendations and half-assed the implementation. Plus if the name ends with g, well, morale was already kinda low from what I heard from ex employees.

McKinsey don’t do implementation. Not doing implementation is what strategy consulting means.

Implementation of strategy. I.e. change management, strategy program management, follow on work from original strategic planning, etc. They do it all the time. But should have clarified between system implementation.

Also McKinsey, Bain and I think BCG have actual system implementation or at least integration offerings now.

McKinsey absolutely DO implementation.

> All of G's employees should move to an open office plan with non dedicated seats.

I've heard about this being discussed at one other large org. It sounds very concerning to me, is there any proven benefit to having non-dedicated seats?

The proven benefit is cost reduction. You can reduce total desks and therefore office space required by estimating how many people are actually in the office on average and then having that many desks + communal working spaces and conference rooms. When I’ve seen the calculations done it’s normally at least a 10% desk count reduction.

When you add in the cost reductions from employees who quit to go somewhere they can get any work done, the savings just keep stacking!

Synergy

Please don't take this as defending Mckinsey, but I think there was a good chance this is a decision that G wanted to take, and they just used Mckinsey as a blame sink.

I feel like the only things recommended are usually the ones that are already popular anyway. Management just needs an excusez

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