I read a good article regarding hiring IT Consultants and thought I would share some of it, some very good tips here. Hiring a consultant is very much like hiring an employee. Here are some tips to cut through the fog: Interview prospective consultants. Have them meet all of those on your team that would need to work with them. This is a chance to determine if the consultant knows his/her stuff, but it is also an opportunity to make sure they can work effectively with your team. Watch out for “Teachers”. There seem to be a lot of consultants in this industry that have great credentials, but have never actually implemented anything. We all know that the real world is frequently quite different than the classroom. Credentials are important and necessary, but make sure that your consultant has actually had experience successfully implementing the project in question. Is it worth paying extra to have the vendor involved? My answer here is “sometimes”. There are a couple of things to watch out for here. For those of you that have been around a while, you probably remember when IBM was king of the IT world, and there was a common belief that when buying products or services from them “you could always buy better, but you could never pay more…”. Vendors always charge big dollars for their consultants, and if you get one of their senior people, this can be acceptable, but they frequently provide their junior consultants for the same price and/or require a two man team for a project unnecessarily. They also subcontract in senior consultants from companies like ours, but charge the big fees because they can. Is it worth paying $300/Hour to the vendor to get one of our senior consultants when you can contract with us directly for $175/Hour? There is a lesson here. If you are going to engage a vendor, make sure it is one of their employees and then interview them like any other consultant hire.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 23:06:21 +0000
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