imho consulting firms are more the problem than consultants. consultants good: get expeirence from many companies. dont have to pay them when you don't need th

imho consulting firms are more the problem than consultants. consultants good: get expeirence from many companies. dont have to pay them when you don't need them. personal reputation and future career always on the line. consulting firms bad: most staff are newbies and have no experience of generating value, only extracting it. when the staff in a consulting firm get good, they leave the firm if they actually want to deliver value (same as govt. workers leave for better pay). consulting firms main goals are to steal your IP and skills, extract as much money as possible and confuse internal staff with jargon to dazzle them. why are there consulting firms on big projects? honestly probably because of a few things lobbying and the ceo playing golf with politicians etc. because of a desire to have a small number of contacts to manage all consultants under umbrellas and because they have may well polished slide decks and put on a big show at sales pitch time, referring to all the work that former employees have done as though anyone in their company can do that. there is no cross check or comparison in these "white paper" e.g. how many times did you fail before it worked, how much did other solutions cost etc. the solution imho is simple.. skip the consulting firms and hire individual consultants when needed. makes sure you have someone on staff, who can send consultants back or a mechanism for doing it that is similar. never accept anyone without independent industry experience from a consulting firm.. they must have actually internally delivered measurable value within a company and been able to provide it.. without an understanding of how your work directly delivers value to the customer then you are not qualified to be a consultant If you only have one employee then they must have two things: vision and the ability to cut through IT bullshit. train up internal staff, they will leave for industry but they are more likely to care if the outcomes are crappy. force consultants to work "two in a box" so their knowledge is always being transferred to you. LISTEN TO YOUR SMEs FFS! consultants are all about appealing to authority, ensure your SME team can talk end-to-end with each other on all processes and make damn sure that leadership has their ear.. However i do wonder if the real underlying cause is that there is a critical mass of decision makers that literally don't care how much government money they waste, so long as its wasted on them.