consultants are idiots

[Tidybuoy]

Originally Posted by Shuie

I guess I've been lucky. I left industry to do consulting work years ago and have never looked back. The consulting groups I've worked with have solved problems, transfered knowledge,

I'm sure you would agree that many times consultants can be valuable to a company. But, when the problem is bad management, it does not matter what the consultants reccomend if the management only want's to hear what they want.

I worked for a company that struggled for years to make a profit and are currently in chapter 13 liquidation. The management wanted to become more profitable doing it the exact same way. Over and over, they hired expensive consultants only to pay big fees and change nothing.

[Shuie]

Originally Posted by Tidybuoy

I'm sure you would agree that many times consultants can be valuable to a company. But, when the problem is bad management, it does not matter what the consultants reccomend if the management only want's to hear what they want.

JMO, but the most important part of any consulting job is to transfer knowledge, or to teach people in industry. It may not be the rubber-hits-the-road-level implementation delivery guy's job, but someone (maybe a partner, or the account exec), should be teaching or mentoring the client side PM on how to do a better job at managing existing resources, etc..

[Oracle]

Our consultants have been awesome (luckily)
Keep a very short leash and don't let them go crazy... If you didn't have the right requirements from the beggining there is a good chance they will never make it to the objective. Sorry but without knowing anymore just what I'm reading you're (or whoever hired and managed them) is part of the problem.
Good luck cause your company will be upset with "IT"

[rnln]

Not sure what kind of consultant you are talking about here. Technical consultant, software/data/development needs equiptments. No equipment = no development. But I understand that more equiptments = more support from you. Sounds like conflict of interest

[MotoSook]

I use to be a consultant as an engineer and as a project manager. I will say that about 10% of consultants are worth their pay...they rest are like someone stated...overly confident of their talent. Maybe that's me too, but boy were there some dip*****s in that arena. I was always careful to provide my clients with the best work so as to not be labeled that consultant who wasn't worth a damn. Prior to being a consultant I had to clean up work that was left behind by consultants....it left a very bad taste in my mouth. That made me swear to myself I would never be one of those.

Still, sometimes budget, timeline and available supporting talent can make a project less than perfect no matter how hard I tried. Clients can make it even harder to turn out good projects. The ones that were knowledgeable were great to work with, but there are lots of clients that just made things messy with their lack of understanding of technical and logistic problems, leading to silly demands that ultimately ended up wioth a Rube Goldberg-esque solution. It's worst when the clients have teams of people sticking their noses into the project who aren't technically familiar with their desired solution. And their project was always the most important project so the most minor things HAD to be done...even at midnight on a Saturday...regardless of the impact on the big picture.

[legion]

Back when I was working with some consultants a few years ago that were trying to sell us some software, we used to have a running joke that if you bumped into one of them and asked them their name, they would reply: "Yes, we can do that."

All of us analysts knew the consultants were overpromising and would under-deliver, but management ate it up. Guess what happened? We were right.

Oh, and I ended up re-writing a lot of the code a year or so later. When the consultants delivered the product, it was taking 45 minutes to process one transaction. I got that down to half a second. I'm not kidding.

[RWebb]

if the OP had hired me as a consultant, I could have told him -- in my carefully polished report -- that consultants are idiots

see -- he wasted his money