Managing Consultants

I am currently paid on a consulting basis.

I put it this way, rather than "I am a consultant" because I do not have any great attachment to the business rules under which I get paid. I want to do good work for reasonable people and in return I want to be paid a reasonable amount.

For many reasons, many of them both tedious and beyond my control, consultants are being demonized; we are the new lawyers: a professional group we all love to hate and can agree to mock. For example, consider this poster from the often-hilarious http://www.despair.com:

While I agree that lawyers are often used ineffectively, I do not agree that lawyers are useless busybodies, just as I don't think that HR exists to making hiring difficult or facilities management exists to stop you from having nice office furniture.

(I blush to admit that I was going to use "first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" until I looked into it and found that I had that backwards: http://www.spectacle.org/797/finkel.html. Sigh. Another blow to my feelings of omniscience.)

Leaving aside the inherent problems with demonizing any group, I have a problem with demonizing consultants. To me, the big difference between generalizing about lawyers and generalizing about consultants is that lawyers are a fairly well-defined group providing a fairly well-defined service, while consultants are a ridiculously varied group with only a compensation methodology in common.

Mercifully, to make my point today I can leave aside the question of whether or not consultants are evil, because it does not really matter: at this point, almost no medium-sized or large companies can do without them.

(In my experience, small firms benefit most from consultants, but small firms seem better adjusted about this issue: happier and more accepting.)

So pick a side: consultants are a useful tool because you can rent expertise that you need for only as long as you need it, or consultants are parasites whose only goal is to addict you to their services. Either way, there they are.

I assert that in this day and age, managing consultants is a key skill, just as managing women was forty years ago, when women started showing up outside the steno pool.

I accept that consultants are not a panacea: institutional memory is good and employee loyalty is good.

I agree that consulting engagements need to be reviewed periodically to ensure that renting expertise is still the best way to accomplish whatever goal toward which your consultants are working.

What I cannot abide is the current mindless swing toward "No Consultants!" as a policy. This is so rarely practical in today's business environment. I say this not because such policies cut into my paycheck: hilariously, they don't cut into my paycheck, at least not so far. What they do is drive up my paycheck as I stand aside and then wait for the frantic emergency calls that always come--unless I hear, instead, the sickly silence of despair as organizations caught in the death spiral of "doing more with less" until they go out of business or fail.

Love them, hate them, but make sensible use of consultants. Don't ban them and don't cling to them forever. Instead, assess your needs, consider both cost and benefit and do what makes sense. That is more work than issuing clear, simple edicts such as "no consultants!" but that is why managers get paid the big bucks, isn't it?