On Project Managers vantage view, provide a comprehensive summary and opinion driven insights of the construction problem stated below.

Following a series of mergers and acquisitions, the company part of an investment group that specialized in sports and leisure complexes appointed a new business development manager. She came from another company in the group where her project management role had involved working with consultants and advisers from a range of engineering disciplines. She considered herself a shrewd judge of competence and value for money where consultants were concerned. At her new company, she found that she had inherited the presence of a firm of environmental engineers who had been its consultants for at least a dozen years. They had a long record of repeat work, commissioned largely by technical managers who had come to see them as a virtually indispensable bank of resources: no other firm of consultants could muster a team of engineers who knew so much about the way the company worked. Why, some of their senior consultants had even been managers in the company. She did not know the firm in question. At her initial meetings with them she sensed they regarded themselves very much as sitting tenants who had almost a right to the work that came their way. The companys procurement staff shared her concerns about the consultants. They were unhappy with the high rates the firm charged, did not believe it gave good value for money, and were uneasy about the personal links between its management and the company.

The consultants completed one assignment for her, but there were problems about their performance and she did not like their business approach or take to them as people. Market testing confirmed that the expertise needed by the company could be obtained from other, smaller firms of environmental engineers. When the next large contract came up for tendering, the company chose to manage the project with an in-house team and split the technical work into several packages that went to a number of the smaller firms. It reckoned that the benefits gained through access to a broader range of approaches and ideas outweighed the increased costs of tendering, administration and contract monitoring.

For their part, the consultants acknowledged that they had failed to appreciate the vulnerability of their position as a consequence of the changes in the clients head office: they had rashly assumed their record of experience meant that they did not have to prove themselves to the new manager.