Public sector transformation often follows the same pattern. First, pressure builds, capability gaps appear, or a programme needs to move faster. In response, an organisation brings in a consultancy. Delivery accelerates, systems get built, and outputs land.
But then the consultancy team leaves.
What’s left behind is usually the hardest part: internal teams maintaining platforms they didn’t design, decisions they didn’t shape, and services they don’t fully own.
On paper, the model works, but in practice, it rarely builds lasting capability. Across the government, there’s growing recognition that transformation can’t depend on external consultancy forever.
Rethinking the consultancy model is about more than simply reducing spending. It also addresses dependency, growth, and sustainable change.
When Delivery Becomes Dependency
Consultancies bring expertise, structure, and scale. In moments of urgency, this can be essential. However, when consultancy becomes the default, it creates unintended consequences.
One of the most common failures is that Build teams quietly become Run teams.
For example, a partner is brought in to deliver a platform. The organisation doesn’t have the skills to maintain it though, so this same consultancy is retained to operate and evolve it.
In this situation, what began as temporary delivery becomes permanent dependency. Costs rise. Ownership stays external. The public purse absorbs the burden.
At the same time, capability stagnates. The right projects do get delivered, but internal teams don’t always grow alongside them. Skills, context, and decision-making remain locked with the consultancy, outside of the organisation.
When each major initiative starts again with a new engagement, a new team, and a new learning curve, transformation becomes episodic rather than continuous. Spending increases, and resilience declines.
Traditional consultancy does have value. But should it remain the dominant model?
A Different Approach to Transformation
A more sustainable model of consultancy is emerging. Instead of outsourcing capability, organisations embed external engineering teams within their own structures. Teams work alongside internal digital, data, and product functions. They deliver outcomes while building skills, confidence, and ownership inside the organisation.
This doesn’t mean removing consultancy overnight, but rather shifting from dependency to partnership.
Embedded delivery looks different:
- Teams operate with knowledge of existing constraints
- Delivery happens alongside internal teams
- Capability grows through direct collaboration
Increasingly, this also enables what many leaders now describe as contractor conversion. This is where rather than cycling endlessly through short-term contractors, organisations convert embedded talent into permanent capability.
This means proven people, real continuity, and long-term savings. Organisation can own their transformation rather than always relying on an external team to deliver it to them.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We see this model working in sectors where organisations want to move faster without losing control.
In financial services, Counter partnered with Skipton Building Society to accelerate delivery while strengthening internal engineering capability. Embedded teams worked alongside Skipton’s developers, enabling faster progress and a stronger in-house function able to continue evolving the platform. After key milestones, Skipton retained members of the team permanently.
In aviation, Counter supported Manchester Airport Group to modernise digital platforms and improve operational visibility. The outcome wasn’t just a new website, but also better delivery practices and retained knowledge across teams.
In central government, Counter has supported Equal Experts in bringing this embedded model to life within a large government department. Engineers delivered critical services while actively transferring knowledge and strengthening the department’s ability to operate and evolve its own technology.
The lesson is consistent: Transformation succeeds when capability is built inside the organisation, not rented indefinitely from outside it.
Why This Matters for the Public Sector
Public sector organisations operate under pressures the private sector rarely faces. They must balance accountability with innovation, long-term value with political cycles, and service continuity with rapid technological change.
In that environment, permanent reliance on consultancy is both expensive and limiting.
Public bodies need teams that understand policy, users, and constraints deeply, evolve services incrementally, and build institutional knowledge over time.
Moving beyond consultancy doesn’t mean abandoning external expertise, but using it differently.
A More Sustainable Model
Counter sits between traditional consultancy and permanent hiring. Embedded engineering teams both deliver outcomes and strengthen internal capability.
Where it makes sense, those teams can also convert into permanent hires. The people who built the systems then become the people who maintain and evolve them, now as an internal part of the organisation.
The direct impact is that costs stay lower than large consultancies, and companies retain ownership and are left stronger than before.
Endless cycles of external delivery can’t sustainably build the future of government digital transformation. For that, we’ll need organisations that invest in their own capability, using external expertise as a catalyst, not a substitute.
The question is no longer whether the public sector can move beyond permanent consultancy.
It’s whether it can afford not to.
