The gap
Most state and local government agencies are staffed to keep the lights on, with maybe enough slack for a small handful of new initiatives at a time. Everything else, including many of the most urgent opportunities and needs, sits beyond what staff can drive alone.
That gap is the table-setting for much of the government consulting industry. Agencies bring in outside firms as temporary capacity, and the model works in a narrow sense: the job gets done.
But when consultants function as staff augmentation, the handoff back to the agency becomes a minor button at the end of the project. A training session, a binder, a closing deck. So even well-executed projects with skilled consultants often leave little behind that truly lasts.
The gaps that drive the capacity shortage in government are rarely about knowledge. They are structural: missing roles, rigid HR and procurement rules, outdated technology. Those are not gaps that can be filled by even the best training sessions or powerpoint decks.
What is Consulting in Residence?
Consulting in Residence (CIR) is a framework for outside support that leaves something lasting behind. The moments that bring consultants in are often also the best moments to build internal capacity: there is a clear reason to change and leadership is making it a priority.
CIR uses that moment for both purposes at once: delivering the urgent result and growing the agency's own capacity, held as equal success metrics from start to finish.
A resident has a stake in the future of a place; a visitor does not. CIR teams work inside the agency's real constraints, in ways the agency can see and repeat, and they treat what stays after they leave as part of the work itself, not as a closing courtesy.
This changes the trajectory of the relationship. Each project should leave the agency less dependent on outside help, not more. CIR builds the entire engagement around that idea.
The Two Disciplines
Capacity-building fails in conventional engagements for a predictable reason: it is scoped as a small workstream at the end, after the work has already shaped itself against being transferable.
The methods that produce fast results run outside agency constraints, so the “how” stays opaque, and agencies are left with outputs driven by processes they cannot see or repeat.Capacity-building work has to run alongside results-focused work from day one.
CIR therefore runs in two disciplines, named for what the engagement does: Result and Reside:
Result is delivering the urgent outcome the agency needs, under its real constraints, in a way that produces a visible record of how it was achieved.
Reside is building toward the agency that can drive those results with less outside support. It defines the internal capacity needed, makes the roadmap to implementing visible, and produces the collateral to move it forward, like job descriptions, role specs, and procurement language.The two disciplines are integrated, not parallel. They share one team, one timeline, and one set of meetings. Result work done inside the agency's constraints reveals what needs to reside;Reside work sharpens as it learns from the Result work.
CIR in practice
Every engagement has a dual scope. The Result scope defines the outcome to deliver, as in any consulting project. The Reside scope starts from a different question: if this same problem arose again after we leave, what should the agency be able to do itself?
The answer shapes everything downstream, from the delivery model (ranging from traditional advisory teams to structures designed to convert into permanent ones) to the way the work is done, visibly and inside the agency's real constraints. Success is judged against both scopes.
Land and compress
Much consulting is a “land and expand” model: get in, prove value, grow the scope, extend the duration. CIR inverts it. The engagement, and those like it, should get smaller over time.
Each CIR engagement aims to move some piece of the work permanently inside the agency, so the next engagement, if there is one, starts further along and ends sooner.
Conventional consulting incentives point the other way, which is why CIR builds the “compress” mandate into scope, delivery, and closeout rather than leaving it to culture. Done at scale, the aim is a public sector that buys outside help by choice rather than by structural necessity. It also means a public sector consulting market that is smaller than today's, and better for it.
Consulting in Residence is a framework developed by 17A, a mission-driven consulting, talent,and technology firm for state and local government. These ideas drive 17A’s own work and arealso open-source and free for practitioners, researchers, and funders to use, adapt, and cite.
