Re: Why people dislike consultants

I think that there is some ambiguity in terminology going on here. When I refer to a consultant, I specifically mean somebody who is contracted for maybe only one day (or less), probably working for a firm of consultants (such as Oracle Consulting). This same kind of person can also be contracted for longer periods, and then the distinction becomes fuzzier between a consultant and an independent contractor. In this posting, I am specifically referring to short-term consultants, on missions of about 1-2 weeks or less.

Does that change anything, or do all the comments stand? Cheers

James

In article <80p29u$41$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>,   morlej_at_my-deja.com wrote:
> 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.
>

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy. Received on Wed Nov 17 1999 - 06:29:10 CST