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Having been in a position where a consultant was foisted upon me by management, at several different companies, near as I can tell they are paid huge sums to re
by dleslie 9y ago
Having been in a position where a consultant was foisted upon me by management, at several different companies, near as I can tell they are paid huge sums to restate what the team already knows and has been saying needs to be done. Only they provide it with an approach and language which management can understand.
- taway20171214 9y agothat's a management consultant, and the reason they're hired is to provide cover and credibility for both management and your technology team. i.e., "the expensive consultant said it was okay, so don't fire anyone in management, or our technology team, if it goes sideways." in other words, they're actually helping you do your job because they can compare your recommendation to other companies and teams in the industry and make sure everyone is doing things sanely. in your case, you were smart, and made the right recommendation, so they agreed with you. good job, you're competent, and aren't putting an established company into a risky situation like you would at a startup, which generally does not hire consultants, because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. you probably didn't see it that way, i'm guessing.
- ZenoArrow 9y agoThe issue you're overlooking is that these management consultants are being paid large fees for information that a company can get for free just by listening to their existing employees. However, that's not a slight on the management consultants themselves (nice work if you can get it), but is a slight on companies that don't trust that their employees can give them sound advice. Problems at the ground level are going to become apparent earliest to those working at that level, if you ignore that feedback you're potentially throwing away valuable information.
- Kinrany 9y agoHow do the companies know that they can trust their employees?
- ZenoArrow 9y agoThey must trust them enough to employ them. Even if they don't think any single person they employ has "all the answers", if you listen to feedback from your employees you can get a sense of trends. Furthermore, these observations should be something verifiable. You're asking for concrete feedback on issues, not vague comments about what's wrong.
- pjc50 9y agoHow do they know they can trust the consultant? (More seriously, being unable to trust your employees to give useful feedback is a sign that your culture is a disaster)
- jwhitlark 9y agoThey diff the output of the consultant against that of the employee. Trust, but verify.
- JohnnyHero 9y agoYou are asking this as if the trust question relates to honesty of the employee. Trust in this scenario is NOT a question of "are they going to lie and steal and cheat! The trust in question here is whether or not the employee/s are sophisticated enough in their understanding of the organizations "big picture directives" to contribute the correct feedback to the questions in need of answers. It is the rare employee whose feedback takes into consideration the big picture because they rarely are exposed to all the information that upper management is. Either management (or a consultant if need be) has to pull in the data/answers and then prioritize the problems relative to the bigger picture. This is a perspective that the production line worker rarely considers when answering questions. Even the biggest brains in any organization can be blinded by the problems that immediately affect them as opposed to the issues that are central to the organizations overall health and strategic goals.
- amenod 9y agoAs GP stated, this is not about (not) believing your employees, this is about risk management. In many cases it is justified - do you really want to run your company based on everything your employees come up with? Sometimes you need to check if their instincts are right, especially for decisions that have huge impact on your business. Price for consultants, while it might seem high to you, is actually pretty low compared to business values. Look at it as a kind of insurance.
- putnam 9y agoDoes something like that exist for software consulting?
- dejv 9y agoYes, I am not sure how common are those gigs, but I did quite a few projects in development agency. It was usually in situations when projects went bad, I had to examine code structure and timelines to see why it went this way.
- jaggederest 9y agoI have done similar work. I was hired to come in and assess the software that they were developing - they were working with some contractors, some vendors, and a smattering of other people, and wanted to know if their current method was working, how to address some concerns they had, and whether their current vendor was doing a good job. I discussed it extensively with them, looked over the code and repositories, their current deployment, their backlog, looked at their priorities and basically told them "They seem like they are doing a good job, with the caveat that using contractors and vendors means you will never develop those skills in house, so I would hire at least one competent programmer internally to work with the vendors/contractors you hire, in order to develop that expertise, if you intend to use custom software as a core part of your business on a continuing basis". This was conveyed via a written report with citations and via a meeting with the C-level executives of the company. For this review and strategic suggestions they paid me about $1200 for an afternoon's work. That doesn't count time that went into acquiring the gig, scheduling, following up, or billing, just billable hours.
- other_herbert 9y agoIt's the sanity check that some managers/ higher up people want... Expert = someone who doesn't work here (from a non dev upper management perspective)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jghn 9y agoBeyond what taway20171214 said, don't discount the value of "language which management can understand". As I've moved up the ladder I've learned how extremely valuable this skill is and how woefully bad I am at it.
- putnam 9y agoWhat do you do now?
- jghn 9y agoRight now I'm in that limbo zone between coder who manages and manager who codes
- ZenoArrow 9y agoIn my experience, "language that management can understand" just means focusing on answering the following questions: 1. What's the proposed issue/improvement? 2. What are the recommended options? 3. How much time will it take to get done? In other words, all you really need to communicate is why we're doing it, and when it will be done. In my experience, they're not interested in challenges faced in implementation. Keep things simple, and deliver on time, and you'll be speaking the "language which management can understand". That's basically all there is to it.
- twobyfour 9y agoDepends on how high up the ladder the management is you're talking to. Your line manager may be interested in a technical issue / improvement and understand its value without further explanation -- for instance, we're using a brute force algorithm that takes exponential time to foo the bar in the Baz module. It's got test coverage and the problem has a known logarithmic solution, so we could rewrite that in a week to be more efficient, and still be confident it's accurate. Your department head may be willing to consider fixing a problem that affects efficiency or security or expected timelines -- we've identified the likely cause of at least one class of those outage events you've raised concerns about. If you want to fix it immediately, we would have to push back delivery of the Quux feature by a week while we rewrite a portion of the Baz application, but other risks are minimal. The C-suite is mostly interested in problems/solutions framed as "how does this save us money" or "how does this make us money" -- we intend to invest a week in technical maintenance work that will allow us to save 25% of our monthly hosting costs by scaling back hardware requirements, and reduce the frequency of outage events that we have to pay out for on under our SLAs by 75%. That would cost $10,000 in developer time and delay our product schedule by a small though measurable amount, but I estimate it would save us an average of $48,000/year in costs.
- raldu 9y agoIn the case you mentioned, that's basically "credibility." Although a lame story, Let's say you are responsible for initiating and managing a new software project in your company with complex bureaucracy and management. You have found that it is highly feasible to work with Agile methodology instead of Waterfall. But Waterfall has been how the things had always been done, yet you know that the team is ready for Agile and project is an exact type of work that would benefit from some "lean" approaches. Worse still, management won't listen, also because "The Board" won't listen. What you do is that you go to that well-known, highly-paid consultant, discuss the situation and he basically says, "OK, You are right. Also this and that." Then in your presentation to the board while pitching Agile, you say, "Agile is the way to go. I asked Patrick Kalzumeus, and he said it was a good idea." And that's it. That "credibility" is one of many ways how a business consultant may "add value" to a highly organized company.
- drdeadringer 9y agoHow do employees gain credibility that management and "The Board" will listen to, or is this question a dream?
- jwhitlark 9y agoI think it's more about getting a credible outside second opinion. for the same reasons you get a second opinion in medicine. It's less a judgement about a single source, than the requirement to have multiple sources.
- popinman322 9y agoProbably by assessing and presenting the cost/benefit analysis to management in a reliable, high quality, easy-to-understand way.
- dleslie 9y agoSounds like a situation where there exists a fundamental absence of trust in the abilities of the team. That's... Probably not a good thing.