Government agencies and clients in the water sector will often commission substantial studies and technical reports, but rarely think to commission an independent review alongside them. My best guess is that reputation does most of the heavy lifting. If the company is well known, the consultants present well, and the findings arrive in a polished deck, the value must be commensurate with the fee. After all, reputation is everything in consultancy. And besides, there are codes of conduct, internal policies, strict QA/QC protocols. The work must have been done right.
Right.
One of the more brazen examples I have come across involved a major firm selling a topographic assessment as an urban flood study. The underlying analysis was, generously, a day’s work for a GIS technician and less for a hydraulic engineer setting up a basic rain-on-grid model from a supplied DTM. Never mind the kilometres of stormwater pipework, never mind the dozens of pumps, none of which entered the analysis. It was branded a flood model, presented as a flood model, and charged in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars. One day of analysis, a few days of maps generation and report writing, a presentation, and voila. Hundreds of thousands in public money, gone. No real value added. Another big bonus for the sales team.
This is one example among many, and it speaks to a wider drift in standards. The American Dialect Society captured it neatly with its 2023 Word of the Year: enshittification. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow to describe how digital platforms quietly hollow out their quality once users are locked in, the word has since escaped its original context. Anyone commissioning technical studies will recognise the pattern.
So how does one push back?
Due diligence: in its simplest form, it means engaging an independent, experienced engineer to sense check the proposed solutions, typically only a few days of focused work.
Just as importantly, it means re-examining the problem statement itself. Not the symptoms that prompted the project, but the underlying cause. Because if the source is not addressed, what you are buying is an expensive, good looking, band aid. This is precisely where an independent consultant, unburdened by the original brief and with no stake in the proposed solution, tends to earn their fee many times over.
And now, off I go to review a water management strategy in which the rehabilitation of a four-walled concrete reservoir has been priced at roughly the cost of a Mediterranean villa in the south of France. Reportedly, the design also proposes lining fifteen acres of land to improve catchment run-off and make the structure actually usable. We shall see.
In the spirit of due diligence: the views, reasoning, and conclusions in this piece were made by a human. The prose was tidied up with help from Anthropic’s Claude.
