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I'm an up and comer in a small regional boutique and while I get lots of time with business owners, executives, and upper management, I rarely get any face time with people from entry level on up to middle management. I'm curious on how consultants are perceived in your organization.
We've worked with a few consultants in my career. Some great, some not so great. We always try and take referrals and look at applicable experiences before hiring. And, we always communicate expectations and goals up front.
usually a total waste - they're into writing massive papers with a bunch of industry jargon that's basically duplicated from efforts they have done at other companies and it ends up being re-done when they're gone because of the utter uselessness. Usually it's an executive okaying the expense and they don't understand that a regular FTE hire would be much more beneficial.
I think it really depends on the field of expertise.
We use a lot of consultants and, in truth, we rely on them to help us reach goals that we could not reach without their resources. In short, we could not function efficiently without consultants.
Most of that corporate "rah rah" be it consultants or employees in the company giving their "motivational speeches" or supposed experts throwing their 2 cents in is a waste of money.
Thats extra money that can go to your people who are actually working and PRODUCING.
Most of that corporate "rah rah" be it consultants or employees in the company giving their "motivational speeches" or supposed experts throwing their 2 cents in is a waste of money.
Thats extra money that can go to your people who are actually working and PRODUCING.
Money talks, BS walks
Maybe you're thinking of something totally different, but professional services can definitely be worth it.
On the whole, if the consultant is hired to asses INTERNAL matters, I think a consultant won't tell you anything your workers and executives don't already know. TPTB won't ask workers but will bring in a consultant to find out. (Which is one reason workers don't think management CARES to REALLY know the honest to G-d truth about place.)
One place I worked hired a consultant and when I saw the report I thought it was full of trite cliches, and very subjective.
Another employer wasted money to hire a productivity consultant who didn't tell them anything people actually doing the jobs couldn't have told management -- anonymously, of course.
Yet, I know a business consultant whose expertise is group dynamics, who swears outside eyes and ears can add a fresh perspective. And I can't just universally disagree.
If the consultant is hired to assess industry markets and potential business matters then, I still think "it depends."
I worked for a company that had hired a consultant (who they paid a ton more than they were paying me for the time that he was there) who took several months to write code for something that was really pretty minor.
Subsequent to adding this code to the project, the software started crashing at random times. Frequent restarts required.
A coworker had me look at the code and I had it fixed in less than 15 minutes. Could have written the code in about a week, where it took the consultant months, had they given the project to me.
Turned out the guy was not doing any garbage collection which caused the random crashing. Looking at crash logs made that really obvious, I don't know why it was a problem for them to find at all. Had that fixed in 15 minutes and took another 15 minutes or so to clean up the code to an acceptable level.
In the main most of the tech consultants I've had to work with were not that useful. If nothing else, the startup time to come up to speed was excessive compared to the work they actually performed.
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