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December 21/28, 1998

IMHO:
Give Consultants A Break

Jill Dyche is a writer and partner in a management consulting firm. She can be reached at jilldyche@baseline-consulting.com

By Jill Dyche

veryone in business has had a bad experience with consultants at some time or another. You've probably seen some yourself: notorious bait-and-switch routines, laughable deliverables full of sound bites but signifying nothing, and the legendary virtual consultant--the one who you've never met, but for whom you get a whopping bill.

One of my clients has a picture of a past consultant on the wall of the break room. The room was anointed "Charlie's Room," in honor of its infamous namesake, who was known to conduct ersatz meetings there. People taking prolonged coffee breaks are for evermore accused of "pulling a Charlie."

Even we consultants encounter bad consultants. Much of my career has been spent cleaning up the work of past peers who came, saw, and screwed up. And pity the client who selects two vendors to work on the same project! I once witnessed fisticuffs between two database administrators--something about correlated subqueries. The project manager had to break up the fight, a task that took much more time than he had scheduled.

But did you ever wonder what it's like on the other side of the fence? I mean, being a consultant isn't always smooth sailing. While there are many advantages, the life of a consultant is not without its perils. And the customer is often one of the biggest.

So I just want to say a few words on behalf of upstanding and hard-working consultants everywhere: We want to help! Although there are consultants out there who prefer milking their clients while bloating their resumés, the majority of us strive to make a difference. Whether we are systems programmers, data modelers, application developers, or enterprise resource planning specialists, we genuinely want our clients to be better off than they were before we arrived. Which, by the way, isn't always that hard.

To put it another way: The preponderance of marketable consultants wants to deliver quality results. But customers don't necessarily make it easy for us. So here are a few words of advice to clients who want to get the most out of their consultants.

We know we have to earn your trust. We got this loud and clear on our first day when you stood outside our cubicle observing your stopwatch. But don't forget to check the quality of our work as well. Your full-time staff is much more interested in the work we leave behind than they are in the duration of our coffee breaks.
Where is the break room, anyway? We don't expect a regal corner office with a private privy and assistants who bring us foamy lattés and take our dry cleaning. (We don't rule it out entirely, though.) Many a time I have been led down the labyrinthine hallways of some company's headquarters and deposited in a cubicle containing nothing but a broken 3270 and a pencil holder--sans pencil--without having even been shown the bathroom. Experienced consultants know to always carry bread and water with them in case of emergencies: the bread to leave a trail of crumbs when venturing off to find the bathroom, the water in case they never find it.
A word about time sheets: I've seen ancient Gaelic stone carvings less cryptic than your time-sheet codes. While we're happy to submit to whatever arcane accounting procedure you deem necessary, could you please include a category for "Time Spent Figuring Out Yet Another Bloody Time Sheet System"? This would certainly save time.

So while we can be expensive, elitist, pedantic, imprecise, and downright evanescent, we consultants really do have your best interests at heart. So hire us today! (Please?)

In My Humble Opinion is an occasional column expressing the opinions of InformationWeek readers. Submissions up to 750 words can be sent to imho@cmp.com. Only writers being considered for publication will be contacted.