3 ms·

I have seen this as well. At a role earlier in my career it turned out we had a major engagement with McKinsey around figuring out what was actually happening i

I have seen this as well. At a role earlier in my career it turned out we had a major engagement with McKinsey around figuring out what was actually happening in some of the most areas most critical to the future. One could rightly point out that this is a symptom of dysfunctional senior management but I think that oversimplifies the issue. Organizations are built over time and simply hiring a new CEO is not really the answer. Its not like a public company can just fire its entire leadership team, even if that is the right thing to do. I ended up feeding a lot of data to the McKinsey team who as it turned out were really smart and helped in both directions, both connecting our team with other parts of the company that might be able to leverage what we were building and also helping our team craft our message to gain the broadest visibility. We could have done it all ourselves but given that they were already there it greatly speeded up the process. The final thing I will say is about costs. With an engineering budget that ran into the hundreds of millions annually, saving a couple million on consultants might seem like an easy optimization to make and it will make no material difference to the company. If they do add some value it will probably be at some multiple of what they cost.

exelius 8y ago
Yeah... consultants really do bring a lot of value for things that are complex, infrequently performed step functions. Of which there are a lot within a company. But ultimately, when you’re talking complex software implementation, you need folks who understand both the business context and the tech context at a deep level. Those people tend to be consultants, either working independently or employed by a major firm (or more often recently, working independently and brought in by a major firm). The job you’re often doing here is switching between multiple business (HR, finance, IT, etc) and technology (application, network, cloud, service, etc) layers. You really DO need MBAs, about half of whom are former engineers with 5+ years of experience. This is complex work that takes nuance and soft skills. If companies could do it themselves, they wouldn’t hire us to come fix their broken Workday/Salesforce/whatever implementations. There are a ton of us too. My MBA program 7 years ago was teaching modern ML/AI (with profs from the school’s top-ranked CS dept) and DevOps. The MBA has become far more tech focused than it was in the past; I would expect modern coursework to include some intro to cryptography if not cryptocurrency.

exelius 8y ago

Yeah... consultants really do bring a lot of value for things that are complex, infrequently performed step functions. Of which there are a lot within a company. But ultimately, when you’re talking complex software implementation, you need folks who understand both the business context and the tech context at a deep level. Those people tend to be consultants, either working independently or employed by a major firm (or more often recently, working independently and brought in by a major firm). The job you’re often doing here is switching between multiple business (HR, finance, IT, etc) and technology (application, network, cloud, service, etc) layers. You really DO need MBAs, about half of whom are former engineers with 5+ years of experience. This is complex work that takes nuance and soft skills. If companies could do it themselves, they wouldn’t hire us to come fix their broken Workday/Salesforce/whatever implementations. There are a ton of us too. My MBA program 7 years ago was teaching modern ML/AI (with profs from the school’s top-ranked CS dept) and DevOps. The MBA has become far more tech focused than it was in the past; I would expect modern coursework to include some intro to cryptography if not cryptocurrency.