Borrow your watch and tell you the time stuff?

[Shugs]

I must admit I had to chuckle having a read of the review Ed Griffiths has done at Bath. He was doing a root and branch job, talking to everyone from the tea lady to the owner. There was deep thinking, mingling with the fans and a general hard nosed look into every nook and cranny at the club. Conclusion?…..They need a defence coach. Brilliant. I hope they kept their receipt.

[Bloke in North Dorset]

There's some truth in the headline.

I've been a consultant, we were a small telecoms consultancy and we'd all been senior managers, engineers or operations staff in industry. We worked alongside the big management consultancies and eventually got bought by one of them.

Mostly of our work was licence bids for mobile phone networks, helping to build networks, working for banks doing due diligence on loans and the like.

We also worked on a number of projects where it was obvious that the sponsor, usually the CEO or FD, knew exactly what the outcome of our work they wanted. They needed us to provide cover and evidence for hard decisions eg redundancies or evidence they could take to the Board to get their way - policy based evidence making as it is wryly referred to in politics.

My guess is that something similar going on here, there's an internal dispute and somebody needed independent evidence to make their case.

[NellyWellyWaspy]

Validation costs money. Common sense is irrelevant. Argument, disagreement, consensus to review, kick to the long grass, sorted, leave it till tomorrow.

[mike909]

There's some truth in the headline.

I've been a consultant

We also worked on a number of projects where it was obvious that the sponsor, usually the CEO or FD, knew exactly what the outcome of our work they wanted. They needed us to provide cover and evidence for hard decisions eg redundancies or evidence they could take to the Board to get their way - policy based evidence making as it is wryly referred to in politics.

My guess is that something similar going on here, there's an internal dispute and somebody needed independent evidence to make their case.

+1

I worked in project finance (amongst other things....) and project risk and lots of Chairs and the like wanted someone to tell their people what was politically difficult to say

I did the same for senior Officers in Local Govt who need to be able to tell Members that their plans were "optimistic"

As for Bath - I rather doubt it's "only" a defence coach required.....