Independent consultancy · Harrow
An outside reading of how an organisation actually runs.
SB Consultancy Services Ltd is an independent advisory practice. Organisations and private clients bring us a situation that has stopped making sense from the inside — a service that costs more than it should, a process everybody works around, a structure that has been added to for years without ever being redesigned — and we look at it properly and say what we find.
The practice advises. It does not take over the running of anything, and it has nothing to sell beyond the advice itself, so a recommendation carries no commercial interest of ours behind it.
How we work
Four stages, each with a decision point at the end of it. Select a stage to read what it involves.
Framing the question
Clients rarely arrive with the right question, and that is not a criticism — the problem as felt from inside an organisation is usually a symptom, not a cause. The first stage is a conversation, and then a written statement of what we understand the question to be, what would count as an answer, and what falls outside the work. Nothing else begins until that statement is agreed, because an engagement without a boundary expands until nobody can say whether it succeeded.
Finding out what is really happening
This means talking to the people doing the work, not only to those managing it. The written process and the actual practice diverge in every organisation, and the gap between them is usually where the answer is. We read what exists — procedures, records, correspondence, figures — and we ask the people who operate the thing daily what they do when the procedure does not fit. Those conversations are treated as confidential in their attribution, so that people can be candid.
Setting out the options
Findings are put in writing with the evidence attached, followed by the realistic courses of action. Each option carries what it would cost in money, effort and disruption, what it would actually fix, and what it would not. Doing nothing is always included as an option and is assessed as seriously as the others, because it is sometimes correct and is in any case the course the organisation will follow if it cannot choose. We recommend, and the client decides.
Handover and afterwards
The engagement ends with a report the client owns and can act on without us — written for the people who have to implement it. We answer questions on the contents afterwards without opening a new piece of work. Where a client wants support through implementation, that is a separate engagement, scoped separately, and it is entirely reasonable to decide you do not need one.
Advisory areas
- Service reviews. Examining a service an organisation provides — what it costs, what it delivers, where the effort goes, and whether the shape of it still matches what it is being asked to do.
- Process and administration. Following a process end to end to find the duplication, the rework and the steps that exist because of a problem long since solved.
- Organisational structure. How responsibilities are divided, where decisions are made, and where accountability has become blurred between roles.
- Governance and record-keeping. Whether the organisation can demonstrate what it decided and why — a question that only becomes urgent at the worst possible moment.
- Supplier and contract arrangements. What has actually been committed to, what is being received in return, and what the exit position looks like.
- Second opinions. A short independent reading of a proposal already on the table, for a client who wants it tested by somebody with no stake in it proceeding.
Contact
Write to the practice with a description of the situation and what has prompted you to look at it. An outline is enough at first; the useful detail comes out in conversation. If the work is not something we would do well, we will tell you that at the outset.
Enquiries are treated as confidential whether or not they lead to an engagement.
Registered office
SB Consultancy Services Ltd19 Greenfield Way
Harrow
Middlesex
HA2 6HU
United Kingdom