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Comment by projectramo | Hacker News Reader

For all you consultant-haters out there: there are some services that are very natural consulting engagements. They have the following properties:

1. A particular company will need the service infrequently

2. Many different companies will benefit from the service

3. The service requires a lot of manpower

4. The service is complicated and has a learning curve

So, to provide a concrete example, suppose you want to re-negotiate all your contracts with all your suppliers. This is the bread and butter of many large firms. However, you can't do it all the time, you only want to do it once every 10 years or so. It is quite complicated and requires a lot of people with experience doing it, and almost any company will benefit from doing it.

This is exactly when you would hire a consultant that is known and respected in this area.

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100% agree. A number of engagements I've been on of late have had to do with changes in government regulation, making sense of that in the local context for a client, then implementing some kind of change (people/process/technology) to ensure compliance (so they can in turn assure government regulators).

This touches on one other thing that large consulting firms have, and that is global reach coupled with great internal networking and knowledge management. Bank A needs to comply with new government regulation which is similar to that passed 6 months ago in country B where we did a similar engagement. No point re-inventing the wheel a dozen times when that country B team is a few clicks away and can guide you through what they did (and more importantly what they learnt along the way).

Consultants are like good lawyers...They have no skin in the game but none the less they act as your agent.

Put another way, it's the consultant's job to tell you what you might not want to hear. In plenty of orgs / cultures this isn't the case. In such cases, staff doesn't like consultants because from the front line the consultant is stating the obvious. However, it really management and leadership who should get the heat because they are the ones who define the culture where info doesn't easily transfer across the layers from see'ers and do'ers to the decision makers.

Exactly!

The problem for many of the pure strategy firms is that clients just bring them in for 2 weeks at the end of a project to “rubber stamp” the strategy. Of course, corporate boards got keen to this strategy and realized they didn’t really need MBB at all and should trust their people more — which is the whole reason the article was written.

Everyone in the industry has seen the writing on the wall for at least a decade. There is a reason the big 4 all went around buying up mid-market strategy firms 5-10 years ago; the market losers were on fire sale and the winners were vulnerable. But the wars there are over; everyone is focused on partnering with software companies for the next round of cloud ERP implementations.

Logically that sounds good, but in practice most of the work is done by people without specific related backgrounds.

The problem is the company can't judge work quality if they don't understand the domain. So, it boils down to most companies over billing and under delivering.

Have you ever done consulting?

The problem is that the company can’t judge the size of the problem they have. When you don’t know what you’re asking you are very likely to get sticker shock.

If two agencies put in a bid on your job, where one is planning to profit on rework (dishonesty) and the other is estimating for all the unknowns, you’re going to go with the first guy because you like his price better. And then you’re gonna get taken to the cleaners.

Rework is often the profit strategy when the client comes to us with a lowball price in mind. Don’t chalk it all up to dishonesty; many times we have to do exactly what the client asks us to first, watch it fail, then suggest a more expensive path for rework.

The right call is the right call, even if the client dislikes the price. But sometimes you have to let the client fail before they’re willing to listen to you (the bigger the implementation, the more true this tends to be).

Yeah, the ugly baby problem, often combined with the desire for best practices results but a complete aversion to best practices.

The consultants can cover the scope and do their job, but if the client doesn't listen and exectute then it's like the long gone consultants will be blamed. The status quo persists, etc.

Sure, the work is done by inexperienced staff — that’s how we train them. But the work is reviewed by someone with experience, who should correct any mistakes before the client sees them.

We try to staff experienced people on engagements, but they get bored and leave the company because all we do are bullshit implementations. You have to give people career progression opportunities, which in consulting means managing teams through execution and training them up.

As a Conversion Rate Optimization consultant I couldn't agree more. We have specific domain expertise and our clients need us infrequently. We also have a large library of wins and can quickly help them get into the high performance zone (and dramatically increase revenue) without them directly incurring the time and expense--A/B testing is expensive from a media buying perspective. But we eventually hit diminishing returns and at that time it is best to end the engagement and move on. If you are curious, here's a case study:

https://moz.com/blog/cro-case-study

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