Factores internos y externos que facilitaron y/o dificultaron el proceso de instalación de la nueva Ley (Estos pueden ser internos, propios del Municipio o externos,

All of the OR consultants in this study emphasised the importance of having regular contact, and with spending time with their clients during projects. This contact includes formal meetings to discuss progress on the project, and also

informal encounters. Contact should be face-to-face where possible, rather than by phone.

When in contact with their clients, ORers are aware of their clients' needs for assurance concerning the progress being made on their problems (see above) . Consequently, they take steps to furnish clients with the information they need. This means

"showing them you're accepting and using their knowledge",

"showing them you're doing something, and understanding them"; "don't appear cocky - show you know your limitations" (emphases added) . Clearly, ORers are concerned with the imacre they present to their clients, as well as with genuinely respecting clients' needs to retain control over the handling of their problems.

Informal contact is usually achieved by the ORer "dropping in" to clients' offices. Obviously, geographical proximity to clients' offices is a distinct advantage here. It is then possible to

"be in a particular office, and wander up and say 'what's happening, man?' .. you .. can say 'on my way down from that meeting. I'll pop my head 'round so- and-so's door and see how they're getting on' .. That is valuable in itself - you maintain your contact, and he sees you as somebody who's around, and will help you if you need".

Being local is considered particularly valuable by the ORers in this study who actually are local to their clients, and also seems to be considered important by their clients - " the manager was particularly keen that we should be on site". Curiously, however, it is not considered important by those based some distance from their clients.

There is a growing awareness, among ORers, of the consulting nature of their occupation, and a corresponding opportunism which shows in their attitudes towards social contact with their clients (and potential clients). One ORer in this study, whose OR group is widely considered to be successful, explained that

"the OR manager goes off and has lunch, quite a lot, with people for whom we might potentially be able to do some work".

The same group throws an "annual clients' party" -

"a way of clearing out the drinks cabinet. Everyone who's been a client in the last year gets invited. By that sort of means, you end up getting into the interesting debates".

This ORer also valued sharing a canteen with clients and users, regarding this as a way of being accepted on a personal level, as well as a way of getting up to date information. Another man, an OR manager, realised during an interview that he had recently visited his clients' regular lunch canteen on three occasions, and on two occasions this contact had led to new projects - "that's not a bad rate of return", he remarked. The value of social contact has, so far, only crept into OR literature as anecdote: Chesterton (1976), in a review of Schultz and Slevin's book (1975) on implementation or OR, suggested that

"one would find it very hard going to actually try to read it . . One would probably gain more for implementation by spending the purchase money on buying your prospective clients drinks".

Graham, who is primarily an anthropologist rather than an operational researcher, cautioned OR consultants

"be ready to drink lots of beer .. it is while sitting at the bar that I find the informal organisation is usually revealed" (Graham, 1984).

My account of an OR Society conference, which emphasised the social programme, appeared with an editorial note explaining that 'the official, high-on-integrity, low-on-long-sessions-in- the-bar, version will appear next month' (Jones, 1988b).

Notably, both Graham and Bryant (1988) suggest that a particular type of information (relating to social processes.

politics etc.) is revealed during these social interactions. Those OR practitioners who utilise extensive social contact are therefore likely to learn to construe 'problems' in a different way, in which human and social factors are prominent. This is a vicious (or benevolent) circle, of course, since their consulting approach is largely determined by their notion of problems.

This approach to socialising is not universally adopted, however. One practitioner described the official social club of his organisation as "quasi-masonic - I've never been". He was no more optimistic about the chances of furthering relationships during lunchtimes: "oh! you couldn't talk to anyone in the canteen". It would be unfair to conclude that this ORer simply had no marketing skills; clearly, it is advantageous to have facilities suitable for entertaining clients. However, on a recent visit to an OR group, I stayed from 12 noon to 3pm, and was not offered a drink during this time, let alone an opportunity to take lunch with members of the group (or indeed without them). It seems that whilst ORers all claim to value relationships with clients, not all have developed the necessary social skills.

Beyond securing reasonable personal and professional relationships, it is clear that consultants must convince potential clients of the value of their work. This may be done directly, by "going and saying 'look, we've done such-and-such in this area. Would it be useful here?'". Once clients' favour has been secured, an OR group may relax its usual project selection criteria in order to maintain involvement with certain clients. One ORer explained:

"we decided that . . because this thing is such an important area, it's something that we are deliberately trying to stay in, even on the basis of doing ad hoc, fairly urgent pieces of work".

Some of the OR practitioners in this study considered it valuable to inform clients, via written publications, of the nature of their recent work. The emphasis in these

publications is on demonstrating that OR can make a useful contribution to many areas of the organisation's work (and, therefore, to a potential client's particular area of work). Again, approaches vary: some OR groups have a regular bulletin, which is distributed widely, one has a magazine that is less well used, whilst other groups use no publications at all. The effectiveness of written advertisements for OR is uncertain; ORers in this study seemed to value these far less than personal contact.

It is clear, from way that the preceding discussion has evolved, that OR consultants have paid quite a lot of attention to developing relationships with members of their organisations who are either potential clients (sponsors or problem-owners), or who may become involved in an OR project at some future date. However, ORers did not emphasise clients' needs to understand their working methods during projects, and appeared to pay little attention to the way that client relationships are actually lived out during the course of a problem-helping project. Again, OR practitioners' awareness of the 'consulting' nature of their occupation seems to be shaped by a dualism between 'consulting' and 'doing the work'.

This is a surprising approach, considering that ORers popularly regard "collaborative" work as an ideal, or even essential, way of operating. In both the "communicator" and "persuader" modes, one would expect that ORers' accounts of project work would emphasise the development of (some form of) understanding between consultant and clients, as a relationship unfolds between these various social actors. The archetypal communication approach is represented by Stillson (1963) who suggests that a contact client should join with an OR team, so that "he will receive "on-the-problem" training and be allowed to participate in the formulation and solution of the problem" . The ORers in this study would reject this condescending consultant-centred approach - we have seen that they do not tend to think as "communicators", in this sense. Tomlinson (1974) speaks for "persuaders" when he describes a

successful project in which ORers worked "as part of a team that was led by a member of the functional department". Most of the ORers in this study have been involved in projects where a working party could be considered to be the problem owner. However, even in these cases, the main purpose of meetings seems to be to discuss progress that has been made in between meetings. Meetings to not tend to be viewed as the actual occasions when progress is made.