On Consulting
I have a habit of tearing out interesting articles from newspapers. I rip them out, fold them, and stuff them into the breast pocket of my suit.
This has the interesting side effect of letting interesting nuggets of information surface when I least expect it. Today I found an fragment of an article that I tore out ages ago, and it could not have appeared at a better time as I was contemplating how to tackle a rather large engagement that we’ve started.
I have no idea what the source of this is other than it’s from a British newspaper sometime between 2006 and 2007.
There are two dangers in consultation. On the one hand, it can simply be lip service, or window dressing, at one extreme; and at the other extreme it can be the experts almost abandoning their responsibilities, saying to people – "What do you want? We will then build it ." If experts are worth anything, they know about pre-risk experience, about how things have been done differently elsewhere. They can look after the longer term and, to my mind, "longer term" sums up the nature but also the problems and the opportunities [in this type of work].
Sunand Prasad
President of the Royal Institute of British Architects
Why do people hire consultants? I think there are two main reasons:
First, if you’re having a lot of pain, you may want to hire someone to take the pain away. By and large, this reason applies to contract consulting (we need 1,000 pages of documentation in order to meet a regulatory requirement – let’s hire some unsuspecting consultant to do it.), or to outsourcing companies (We’re still running Windows98 in the accounting department – anyone want to migrate our users data to our new systems? Anyone?)
The second reason is exemplified Mr. Prasad’s quote. Consultants tend to focus in a particular area and then do lots of projects in that area. We’ve not done something once, but dozens or even hundreds of times. The experience and insight developed from these activities means that we can build risk-mitigation into the design and into the system. It also means that we understand how things have been done elsewhere. We constantly refine our approach, picking up best practices and lessons learned. We build flexibility into the system when possible so that it can be changed or amended later.
The equally smart, but novice designer will spend too much time trying to figure out what to do, essentially because there is a fear that an action taken now could cause an un-retractable problem in the future. They will spend too much time and still not get it quite right.
When used correctly, consultants can save companies immeasurable amounts of time and resources by eliminating future problems before they happen.
This also requires a responsible consultant. One who is aware of her practice as craftsmanship. Once who does not give lip service or who does not go in too far over their head in doing "whatever the client wants."
-John Lamb, Modality Systems