If you have to hire an outside company to come in and tell you how to fix your business, the first thing that needs to happen is all upper management needs to be fired. If you don't know what needs to be fixed you don't belong in the job

Oftentimes upper management hires these people and the reccomendations seem to always be that upper management should be paid more and the problems lie with the subordinates. At least that was my experience many years ago when I had the misfortune of working for someone other than myself.

I am a consultant, and I agree with this message

As good a time ever to remember the Bob's....

quote:

Originally posted by Lord Vaalic:
If you have to hire an outside company to come in and tell you how to fix your business, the first thing that needs to happen is all upper management needs to be fired. If you don't know what needs to be fixed you don't belong in the job

Word.

But it's worse when upper management thinks they know how to fix it themselves, and try.

I have consulted. I have employed the services of consultants. Whether or not their use is indicative of somebody in over their head(s) or not depends upon why the consultants are being employed.

E.g.: When I was getting up-to-speed on MS-Windows NT 4 we hired a consultant to set up the server. I sat with him through the entire process. I'd spent a significant amount of time, beforehand, getting up-to-speed on NT 4 on my own. In this case the consultant's role was: 1. Make sure the install was done right, the first time and 2. See if there was anything I missed in my self-teaching and to learn about any tricks/gotchas.

That, to me, was a legitimate use of a consultant.

Conversely, my biggest consulting gig was to a manufacturer that was trying to do something that had never quite been done before at the time: A fully-automated custom build facility. Whomever designed it had the right idea. (It was actually quite slick.) Unfortunately the technical people they put in charge of realizing the design were in way over their heads. They had a dozen or more vendors whose stuff all had to integrate in different ways. Company technical management had no clue, so they depended upon the vendors to "work it out." Well, you can imagine how that went.

I was called in to save the launch from impending disaster. I should not have been necessary. The company in question should have hired somebody like me to oversee the technical aspects of the project in the first place.

True. Upper management.....nuff said.

I was a "fixer" in my last job. I started as a line staffer, and stepped up a number of levels in 12 years, gaining contracts and making my local office VERY profitable. Within 6 months of my retiring, the office in question managed to lose 20 percent of it billable hours and quite a few contracts, including two they had maintained for 15 years.

Please hire a consultant to come in and fire the morons.

A Consultant is an Out-of-Work professional looking for a job!

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
Oftentimes upper management hires these people and the reccomendations seem to always be that upper management should be paid more and the problems lie with the subordinates. At least that was my experience many years ago when I had the misfortune of working for someone other than myself.

If they didn't expect that answer why the hell would upper management hire them in the first place?

quote:

Originally posted by Kenpoist:
I am a consultant, and I agree with this message

Ditto. I worked for one of the largest consulting firms, and the reason for its existence was that clients were too lazy or too stupid to do the work themselves.

quote:

Originally posted by CoolRich59:

quote:

Originally posted by Kenpoist:
I am a consultant, and I agree with this message

Ditto. I worked for one of the largest consulting firms, and the reason for its existence was that clients were too lazy or too stupid to do the work themselves.

Not always true. The consulting company that I worked for did a lot of system design for client companies that did not have enough people on board to do a full system design and implementation. It would not have been practical for them to hire a staff for a one-time job, so they used our services.

It's a self-licking ice cream cone. Lots of the upper management likely worked at the consultant company before.

And here I am trying to get on with one of the large consulting firms...

The OP is correct in the situation described.

I think when you need technical expertise beyond what is normal in your company, this type of consultant is acceptable.

If your company is hiring 'consultants' that are theme park and executive leadership hucksters that also sell self help books, have executive level training requiring massive amounts of kool-aid, multi day junkets to resorts and destination sites to improve your customer relations or employee morale, it's probably too late for the company, the execs should have been removed long ago. Either join in enthusiastically, or plan to go elsewhere.

quote:

Originally posted by dynorat:
The OP is correct in the situation described.

I think when you need technical expertise beyond what is normal in your company, this type of consultant is acceptable.

If your company is hiring 'consultants' that are theme park and executive leadership hucksters that also sell self help books, have executive level training requiring massive amounts of kool-aid, multi day junkets to resorts and destination sites to improve your customer relations or employee morale, it's probably too late for the company, the execs should have been removed long ago. Either join in enthusiastically, or plan to go elsewhere.

This is well put. I've been on both sides of this equation. Sometimes the specific expertise in an area is thin and the time to hire/build/learn that too short for that to be an option without losing advantage or further exacerbating shortfalls.

Then it sometimes makes sense to lease that expertise immediately rather than try to buy it.

quote:

Originally posted by Anush:
A Consultant is an Out-of-Work professional looking for a job!

Sometimes, but not necessarily.

If I'd been sufficiently self-motivated (a man's got to know his limitations), had been willing to live with the possibility of occasional periods of financial drought (which mainly means learning to save for a rainy day--another thing at which I'm not particularly adept), wanted to deal with customers (*yech*), and had been willing to deal with the paperwork (double *yech*) I could've gone into independent consulting and netted two times what I did over my career, if not more.

A number of people I've known in the consulting business did it for that reason and because it allowed them to mostly pick and choose what jobs they'd do.

A consultant is someone you hire to tell you the time. They borrow your watch, tell you the time, keep your watch, and charge you for the information.

I was a consultant.

I was a consultant, for about two years. For some corporate needs, consultants can be useful. We did not tell clients what to do. We ran specialized improvement projects that required statistical experimentation. Clients typically did not want to do this type of work continually, so they hired us for periodic efforts.