However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results

Abstract: The public sector has during the last decades dramatically increased the spending on management consulting services (MCS). Academically is the subject still surprisingly unexplored. Empirical research on the interaction between public agencies and management consultants is limited, and even less is known about how the sector evaluates MCS. Research on MCS have traditionally been focused on the consultant, neglecting both the client and the contextual surrounding. More recent research has however found that managers experience uncertainties in the interaction with management consultants. The purpose of this thesis is to expand the knowledge on the client side of MCS, in the context of the Swedish public sector. The aim is to examine how buyers of MCS in the public sector perceive uncertainties linked to management consulting projects, and whether these uncertainties affect ex-post evaluation processes. Using a client-type framework sprung from research on the private sector, we test the validity of said framework and use the findings as a lense to examine patterns with agencies' evaluation routines. The collected data is qualitative and consists of 24 semi-structured interviews in total, with a main study of 21 interviews with 20 Swedish state agencies. Findings include that i) the perceived uncertainties differ from the private sector ii) a new client-type has been identified iii) the majority of agencies evaluate MCS informally iii) no clear patterns between experienced uncertainties and evaluation routines have been detected. The thesis' contribution is to the client-focused research in the contextual perspective on management consulting services