Re: Why people dislike consultants

James,

         You must have run into some bad consultants. I've been a consultant for near
on ten years (salaried, with a consulting group) and my clients get to know a few things
when I work for them.
1. I am there to solve a particular problem (or set of problems) that my skill set allows
me to be good at, and I'll do that in a professional efficient way. 2. The client organisation does not have that skillset, and they need a solution now, not
in however long it takes to hire a permanent staff member and get them ramped up.
3. The skillset that I bring is usually not one that it is economical to retain. ie. The client
organisation couldn't keep a DBA/Technical Analyst employed efficiently 100% of the time.

We consultants are generally troubleshooters, we're a tool that is applied to a specific
problem and then put away. If we're any good we're only needed once.

My 2 cents
Mark

<morlej_at_my-deja.com> wrote in message news:80p29u$41$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com...
> Dear All,
>
> It seems to me, from my experience in the industry, that people do not
> like computer consultants very much. As my experience mostly falls in
> the Oracle domain, I thought this would be a good place to ponder this
> issue.
>
> I thought I would scribe some of my thoughts to provoke the discussion.
> Some may be a little contentious, to shake the bag a bit, so to speak:
>
> Q1. Who commissions a consultant?
> A1. Your boss - somebody with enough approval authority to pay for the
> service. This is the first bone of contention - is it true that when a
> consultant appears, he/she is not entirely expected/wanted by the
> people doing the work?
> Nobody can dispute that you really need help once in a while, for any
> number of reasons. How CHEAP would consulting help need to be in order
> to allow the purchasing decision to fall back into the hands of the
> guy/gal with hands on keyboards? Would this kind of model make the help
> more welcome?
>
> Q2. Why do consultants get commissioned in the first place?
> A2. Bandwidth. Surely most of the value that a consultant brings is
> already available in an increasing number of online resources? Is a
> consultant not a redundant figure? What possible extra value can a
> consultant bring? Is it purely the case that there is not enough time
> to surf for the answers?
>
> Q3. Are consultants good enough to rehire?
> A3. Mostly not. This results in a large proportion of the chargeable
> hours being spent by the consultant finding his/her feet, only to never
> return. Net result to the permanent employee: lots of wasted time, and
> only a small gain made.
>
> Q4. What do consultants NOT offer as a service?
> A4. What people actually need. Things like a nicely organized approach
> to performance analysis, complete tools for space management, and so
> on. Consultants enjoy being enigmas, and cherry picking the nice work,
> like narrow-band performance investigations, and the best bits of
> architecture work.
>
> Am I wrong, or are these common feelings? If I were a consultant, I
> would want to know what I could do to be a shining light - perhaps
> asking the following questions in addition to those above:
>
> What are your most common performance problems?
> What duties takes the most time in your job?
> What duties do you dislike the most?
> What can I do to help?
>
> Just my two pennies!
>
>
> James
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
Received on Mon Nov 15 1999 - 20:37:58 CST