The quality of advisory services will ultimately depend upon the skills and ability of the individual adviser actually doing the work. Therefore, the Owner should be careful to engage consulting firms on the basis of the capability of the specific individuals who will be providing the advice, rather than on the firm's overall reputation alone.
It is important to ensure that if key individuals from a firm are nominated in a tender response, that those individuals are available to execute the assignment for the required duration. The same result will not necessarily be delivered where the firm substitutes different individuals to perform the work, and the Owner should not accept this approach without review. Similarly, the Owner should be cautious about accepting other forms of substitution, such as reducing the time of one key adviser and correspondingly increasing the time of another.
Before engaging any specific adviser, the workload of nominated advisers on other projects should be checked.