There was an article earlier this week about why every engineer should do a stint in consulting. This is why. The reason companies like this use consulting co

There was an article earlier this week about why every engineer should do a stint in consulting. This is why. The reason companies like this use consulting companies is because the VPs want total control. Internal IT is purely a cost center, and unless your company (read: the business) is already on board with the product lifecycle op model, there is no point in trying to do any of this from within IT. Consultants work at the VP level and in a large enough company, we find a technical area (usually data as it has the biggest business returns) to modernize, then leverage success there build out the business case for the rest of the company (data is a good place to start building API gateways). And selfishly, the business is willing to pay higher hourly rates than internal IT (which we generally leave to the offshore MSPs). When I sell transformational solutions to a company, I know it won’t be successful without top-down buy-in. Consultants are also better positioned to do these transformations because we do them all the time; and the exercises around stakeholder management and consensus building are extremely important. They’re the kinds of things internal teams are never resourced or trained for, and they don’t happen quickly.