Consultancy assignments: the types, how they are awarded, and how to win them

In a goods or works contract the deliverable is a thing: a bridge, a batch of laptops, a year of cleaning. In a consultancy assignment the deliverable is judgement — a study, a design, an evaluation, a strategy — and what the buyer is really purchasing is the specific people who will produce it. That single difference drives everything else: why consultancy is rarely awarded to the lowest price, why named CVs decide outcomes, and why a firm with a superb corporate record still loses when it fields the wrong team.

1. The main types of consultancy assignment

Terminology varies between buyers, but the work itself falls into a small number of recognisable shapes. Knowing which one you are reading tells you what the proposal must prove.

• Feasibility and pre-investment studies. Should this project happen at all, and on what terms? Technical options, demand, cost, risk. Often the precursor to a much larger works contract — which is why doing one can exclude you from bidding on the build.
• Design and supervision. Detailed engineering design, then supervising the contractor who builds it. Long assignments, heavy on named key experts with specific certifications and comparable-project experience.
• Technical assistance (TA). Embedding expertise inside an institution to build its capability — the dominant form in development programmes. Judged on the adviser, not the method.
• Evaluations — baseline, midline, endline, and independent final evaluation. Did the intervention work? Scored hard on methodology, sampling and evaluator independence.
• Research and policy studies. Original evidence to inform a decision. The methodology section is the bid.
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) frameworks. Designing the measurement system rather than doing the measuring.
• Institutional and organisational reviews. Structure, staffing, processes, governance. Sensitive work; references matter more than usual.
• Capacity building and training. Curriculum, delivery, and increasingly a requirement to show what changed afterwards.
• Management and IT systems. MIS design, digital transformation, data governance. Sits between consultancy and software procurement, and is sometimes tendered as either.
• Financial, audit and due-diligence assignments. Usually restricted to firms holding a specific professional registration.

Cutting across all of these is the split between an individual consultant — you, contracted personally — and a firm assignment, where an organisation fields a team. They are advertised differently, priced differently and evaluated differently, and applying to one as though it were the other is a common, immediate rejection.

2. How consultancy is actually selected

Price alone almost never decides. The method is usually named in the notice, and it tells you where to spend your effort:

1. QCBS (quality- and cost-based selection). Technical and financial scores combined at a stated weighting — commonly 80:20 or 70:30 toward quality. The default for most development-bank consultancy. See QCBS and tender evaluation methods.
2. QBS (quality-based selection). The best technical proposal wins; price is negotiated afterwards. Used where the assignment is complex or hard to specify.
3. FBS / LCS (fixed budget, least cost). The budget is published and you fit the scope to it, or the cheapest technically compliant bid wins. Reserved for standard, well-defined work.
4. CQS (consultant qualifications selection). Award on qualifications alone, for small assignments. Your EOI is the bid.
5. Individual consultant selection. CV, availability and daily rate, usually with a short interview.

For firm assignments, the shortlist is drawn from expressions of interest — typically six firms — and if you are not shortlisted there is no proposal to write. The EOI is therefore the real competition, and it is scored on comparable assignments: same sector, similar region, similar value. Lead with your most similar work, not your best.

3. How to get consultancy work with UN organisations

The UN is not one buyer. Each agency — UNDP, UNICEF, WFP, UNHCR, WHO, FAO, UNOPS, UN Women and the rest — procures under its own rules, on its own timetable, and often through its own portal. There is no single door, and the practical route differs sharply depending on whether you are an individual or a firm.

Start with registration. The United Nations Global Marketplace (UNGM) is the shared vendor registration and tender portal for most of the system. Registration is free. Complete the profile properly and select your UNSPSC codes carefully — several agencies notify vendors by code, so a thin profile means you never hear about the work.

Then understand which contract type you are chasing. The names differ by agency, but the categories are consistent:

• Individual Consultant (IC) / Individual Contractor Agreement (ICA). You are engaged personally, for a defined deliverable or period, at a daily or monthly rate. Advertised on agency job and procurement pages as often as on UNGM.
• Institutional or firm contract. Your organisation is contracted and fields a team. Reached through an EOI then an RFP.
• Long-Term Agreement (LTA). A framework: you are pre-qualified for a period, then called off as needed, usually with no guaranteed volume. Slow to win, valuable to hold.
• Rosters. Several agencies maintain expert rosters recruited through periodic open calls. Getting on one is the single highest-leverage thing an individual consultant can do, because assignments are then sourced from it without competition each time.

What actually wins UN consultancy work:

• Answer the terms of reference literally. UN evaluation is compliance-driven and frequently uses a pass/fail technical threshold before financials are opened. Mirror the ToR headings and address every deliverable explicitly.
• The CV is the proposal for individual work. Match the required years, sector and regional experience line by line — evaluators score against the stated criteria, not against your general excellence.
• Language and country experience are often hard requirements, not preferences.
• Price to the published modality. Many agencies expect an all-inclusive daily fee; others reimburse travel separately. Getting this wrong reads as not having done it before.
• Expect the administration. Vendor registration, bank verification, mandatory online courses (ethics, security), and payment on accepted deliverables rather than on time worked. Budget for the cash-flow gap.

FreeTender indexes UN and development-agency notices alongside government portals — see UN procurement and UNGM step by step for the registration walkthrough, and browse current work by funder.

4. The big consulting organisations, worldwide

Worth knowing for two opposite reasons. On large assignments these firms are the competition. On many others they are the prime — and subcontracting to a prime, or joining a consortium as the local partner, is how most smaller consultancies get their first internationally funded work. See joint ventures and consortium bidding.

Global strategy and professional services

• McKinsey & Company · Boston Consulting Group · Bain & Company
• Deloitte · PwC · EY · KPMG
• Accenture · Oliver Wyman · Kearney · Roland Berger · Arthur D. Little

International development and public-policy consultancies. These are the firms that most often hold donor-funded technical assistance and evaluation contracts:

• DAI · Chemonics · Abt Global · RTI International
• Tetra Tech · Palladium · DT Global · Cowater International
• GOPA Consulting Group · GFA Consulting Group · Landell Mills · Particip
• Oxford Policy Management · Adam Smith International · ICF · Ipsos

Engineering, infrastructure and design supervision

• AECOM · Jacobs · Arcadis · WSP
• Mott MacDonald · Ramboll · AtkinsRéalis · Egis · Systra

This is an indicative map of the market, not a ranking or an endorsement, and it is far from exhaustive — strong regional and national firms win a great deal of this work. If you intend to partner rather than compete, most of these publish their current programmes and partner or supplier pages on the sites above; approach with a specific assignment and a specific capability, not a general capability statement.

5. Practical advice for winning consultancy work

1. Decide early whether it is really yours. Consultancy proposals are expensive to write. If the ToR names experience you cannot evidence, walk away — see bid cost and budget strategy.
2. Secure your experts before you name them. Fielding a CV without written availability is both a disqualification risk and, if you win, a delivery crisis.
3. Write the methodology for the evaluator. Structure it to the published criteria, in their order, using their vocabulary — writing a winning technical proposal.
4. Price the real level of effort. Consultancy is won on quality and lost on delivery. An under-priced person-day budget produces a team too thin to do the work.
5. Ask for the debrief. On QCBS you can usually learn your technical score. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you are losing on quality or on price — and the fix is completely different in each case.