This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.

Every spring, my friend Sam and I work on a consulting project together. The project is a program evaluation: the State of California requires the company (our client) to hire a disinterested firm (that’s us) to evaluate the effectiveness of one of the company’s programs.

In previous years, the program has been a big part of the client’s revenue and they’ve cared a lot about the answers. But the client has expanded nationwide over the past year, they’ve got contracts with a lot more companies in a lot of states, and this particular program is suddenly (really suddenly!) only a small part of their business… so small, as a percentage, that they pretty much don’t care about the numbers we get this year, as they said (politely) in a phone call. The analysis has a lot of required elements that are kind of a hassle for the client and it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t participate in this program at all next year.

Still, we were on the hook for the report so Sam and I worked on it just as we always do.

With a couple of days to go before our deadline for submitting the report, we were on Slack on a Saturday afternoon hashing out a few things. We had this exchange:

Me: I get it that they don’t want or need to mess with this nonsense anymore, I’m happy for them and that’s good news for the industry in general. But it’s not a great feeling that the client doesn’t care about our work!   There’s a moderately famous John Updike piece about the retirement of Ted Williams, in which he says “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.” 
  
Sam: So you are Ted Williams in this scenario?

Me: You and me both. I mean, why are we both doing our best (or something approximating our best) when nobody else cares?

Sam: Gotta have standards and as an independent consultant, standards/reputation are about all that matters. I think it comes from internal compass, but that in turn means we can do this type of work successfully. To answer your question, like Ted Williams, I think we are both worried about personally being associated with deficient work.


There’s no particular message here, I just have the impression that there are a few people who follow this blog who appreciate hearing stories from the world of statistical consulting every now and then.

This post is by Phil