Consultants in trenches
Firm’s staff grows to be part of team
You’ll probably never see their names on a plaque at the school board’s central office, but it would not be out of line to give the Boston Consulting Group team much of the credit when the new unified Memphis and Shelby County Schools open in August of next year.
J. Puckett, Nneka Rimmer, Reggie Gilyard and the young “brainiacs” of the team — Transition Planning Commission chairwoman Barbara Prescott’s word — are getting high marks for the professionalism and bloodless objectivity that marks the work they’re doing for the TPC.
Puckett is a senior partner and managing director from Dallas, Rimmer a partner and managing director from Chicago, Gilyard a partner and managing director from Los Angeles.
Also working with the Memphis City and Shelby County Schools staffs to help decide what their baby should look like are Lane McBride, Nithya Vaduganathan, Marc Casale, Jaime Rooney, Valerie Johnson and Sarah Dillard.
Most team members are here most of the week, producing reams of reports for commission consumption and relentlessly pushing the TPC toward completion of a consolidation plan.
When the final touches are put on the first draft — if all goes as expected, that will happen Thursday — the plan will be largely a product of the BCG.
The roughly 180-page document — part-prose, partPowerPoint — will then go to the unified school board and the state education commissioner for suggestions, then back to the TPC for possible revisions and submittal to the board and commissioner for final approval.
BCG fingerprints will be all over the document, including important features such as its Multiple Achievement Paths organizational structure, designed to accommodate a school district that will have multiple operators — the district itself as well as charter school managers and the state -run Achievement School District .
The group’s influence also has been felt in cost- controlling initiatives coming out of the TPC’s Logistics, Human Resources and Finance committees.
“I’m a huge fan,” said Finance Committee chairman Staley Cates, whose committee is charged with finding ways to balance what is expected to be a $1.2 billion first-year budget.
Not only has the BCG team served as a sort of proxy for a full-time staff, it has deftly handled objections to its recommendations that naturally develop on a commission with strong social and political ties.
Whether the discussion is about school district employees who will lose their jobs because of privatization or the effect on the unified district if suburban municipal school districts take root, members of the BCG team work to keep the discussion on a logical, unemotional plane.
“I just haven’t seen them get tripped up by that,” said Cates. “They’ve not been reactive or defensive or offended, which would be easy to do. To me they have stayed clinical and objective and neutral.”
One of the world’s largest and most prestigious consulting firms, BCG will have banked more than $1.7 million — donated by local philanthropic organizations — by the time its work here is done, probably this August.
Cates and other TPC members believe, however, that the community is getting what it’s paying for.
The business world’s fear with consultants is the baitand-switch maneuver, with senior consultants winning the assignment and leaving juniors to do the work.
In Memphis, senior people have been fully engaged, Cates said, and the juniors — “the ones we’re leaning on as committee chairs” — have been “fantastic.”
Kenya Bradshaw, who co - chairs the TPC Community Engagement and Communications Committee, said members don’t seem to be pushing any particular agenda. Even when they’re crunching numbers on a privatization plan, she said, they’re just ref lecting current trends in the business world.
Logistics chairman Richard Holden was skeptical at first . “I thought we were the experts,” he said, but “I was pleasantly surprised” by how much knowledge about education the BCG team brought to the table.
He has also been surprised by their work ethic. Members of the team have been known to work through the night to meet a deadline. He just sometimes has to remind them that they’re in the South, and they need to talk a little slower.
“They really have become part of the (TPC) team,” said Prescott. “They really work with us, and all the time they have just a very good understanding of the fact that the decisions in this process are up to the TPC.”
BCG team members also remind the TPC of its guiding principles and how they relate to the recommenda- tions they make. They compile best practices from other districts, analyze the operations of MCS and SCS, understand the legal ramifications of the project and try, not always with complete success, to keep the commission on schedule.
Some members of the team have their MBAs; at least one has a law degree. They fly out on Fridays, return on Mondays and work long hours in between.
BCG got the contract, among other reasons, Prescott said, because of its willingness to operate in the fishbowl created by the state open meetings and open records laws, which don’t apply to their business clients.
That and other factors leaves the title of consultant somewhat lacking as it relates to the Boston Consulting Group.
“It includes some consulting work, but it’s also being with you day to day through the process and in the trenches,” said Puckett.
“The way we think about it that we’re the transformation and merger partner with you all to help you come up with a plan for the community.”