Future Friendly’s Anthony McGinness joins Australian Government Consulting as deputy

Anthony McGinness, the Canberra founder of EY digital and product design acquisition Future Friendly, has joined in-house government advisory Australian Government Consulting as a deputy.

McGinness joins the government’s internal advisory wing after establishing Future Friendly’s Canberra branch in 2017 and then crossing as a director to EY upon its sale in 2023, prior to which he also spent a decade at now Atturra-owned Noetic.

Led by McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company alumnus Andrew Nipe, Australian Government Consulting – or AGC – was officially launched roughly around the same as the EY acquisition, with McGinness now becoming the in-house advisory’s third deputy chief consulting officer.

“I’ve always been an advocate for the public sector and building the capability needed to deliver for Australians through good policy, strategy, and service delivery,” McGinness said in a post to LinkedIn. “AGC’s focus on strengthening government from within and working alongside agencies to solve complex problems is really meaningful and exciting for me.”

The move for McGinness marks a return to the public sector, with the business informatics graduate of the University of Canberra having kicked off his career with four years as an analyst at the Australian Tax Office. From there he joined Noetic, rising to head of consulting, with the strategic public sector consultancy later sold to FTS Group, which has since been rebranded as Atturra.

McGinness then set up the Canberra branch of digital product and design studio Future Friendly, which was co-founded by Nick Gower and Jon Christensen over two decades ago and quietly sold back at the end of last year after spending two years under the EY umbrella, with the Big Four firm having also last year launched its own global integrated CX, design and marketing practice.

While at EY, McGinness served as Future Friendly’s director of digital government & policy design, with the business continuing its long-running Good Design awards streak, named ‘team of the year’ for 2023. McGinness has also since last year been a Good Design ambassador, an honorary title given to the pioneers and change-makers of Australia’s wider design community.

“I’m incredibly grateful to the Future Friendly team and so proud of what we achieved together,” McGinness said upon departing EY at the end of last year. “Thirty-plus Good Design Awards. Products, services and policies designed and launched and delivering for citizens. I can’t wait to see what Future Friendly does next after having returned to independent ownership.”

Australian Government Consulting

Now though, after almost two decades of serving public sector clients as an external consultant, McGinness will be advising them from within as part of the current government’s ongoing efforts to reduce the country’s federal consulting spend by cutting out or curtailing the likes of his former employer. Criticised for an apparently slow start, the agency is again attempting to ramp up.

As a deputy chief, McGinness leads a team of senior consultants who have extensive experience from across the consulting landscape, including at McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC.

Growth on the agenda

A recent report in the Canberra Times described AGC as being currently “under the pump”, with a team of just three dozen or so advisors and demand far outstripping supply. As such, the agency has embarked on another recruitment drive, Nipe recently telling Senate estimates that the aim was to grow its numbers by up to 150 percent by 2029-30, albeit with a still steady approach.

“We’ve been quite careful to make sure that we weren’t, while we’re still quite small relative to the rest of the market, drumming up so much demand that we would just be saying no to lots of people and essentially wasting their time,” Nipe said in the hearing. “We’ll be on a rolling recruitment basis over the next few years, growing at a fairly fast pace but also one that we can manage.”