A priest, a rabbi and a consultant were all sitting in Row 12 on
an airplane. There was a problem with the plane and it was clear that it was
going to crash. The priest began to pray the Rosary. The rabbi began to read
the Torah. The consultant? He was up and
down the aisle trolling for product liability clients clients.
Consultants get a bad rap. Sometimes deservedly so. I
thought about this recently amid the revelations of the government’s failed www.healthcare.gov website. It appears
that rather than hire a consultant to manage the development of the site, the
Department of Health and Human Services allowed one of its own agencies to oversee
the development and testing of the website.
This is not a rip-on-ObamaCare riff. But it is about what
happens when a technology project goes awry. And it’s about whether you should
hire a consultant and when it makes sense to do so.
Here are just three examples of when hiring an outside consultant makes sense. First, hiring a consultant makes sense if you have a lack of staff
time to allocate to your project. I know of few organizations that have time on
their hands. Bringing in a consultant makes sense if you have a one-off project
and not enough time. If you have a continuing project it makes sense to hire
your own staff.
A second reason to hire a consultant is if you or your staff
lacks the expertise to get the job done. This takes some soul-searching on your
part. But be honest. Who has the time or inclination to do everything? If
you’re a technology-driven company and you need a sales portfolio prepared, it
makes sense to go to a sales consultant.
A third reason to hire a consultant is to put “another set
of eyeballs” on the problem. In business we often spend so much time on a
project that we develop what I call a proprietary interest in it. We built it;
we own it. Having employees invested in a project is good. However, being so
invested that you can’t see the flaws in your baby isn’t so good. A consultant
can come in and give you an honest appraisal of where you are in the project
and how to bring it in for a landing.
These are basically the three reasons people hire us. There
are others, but most of our calls come when nobody on board has the time or the
expertise, or the objectivity to bring a business development project to
conclusion.
For example, for several years we were retained by a think
tank called the Center for Health Transformation. CHT was at the time a think
tank based in Washington, that provided thought leadership on how to use
healthcare technology to improve the quality and lower the price of healthcare.
Our job was to interview and report on notable uses of
cutting edge technology in the healthcare industry, including accountable-care
organizations, health information exchanges and healthcare analytics. Our job
was to produce a series of white papers on health IT for the client.
CHT didn’t hire us because of a lack of expertise. There
were more health IT policy experts in their hallways than the hallways of
Congress.
But CHT lacked one thing: time. In the fast-paced DC
environment they lacked the time to methodically dig out the necessary
information and produce attractive crying-to-be-read white papers. That’s what
we did, bringing the objective eye of a reporter and the sharp pencil of an editor
to the job.
Some of those white papers are available for viewing on this
site.
Not all jobs have the crushing deadlines, technical
complexity and inbred proprietary design require a consultant. But a lot do.
(DHHS, are you still reading?)
So here’s some free advice from the consultants: If your job
is in that category, stop going around in circles and start looking for help.
Now start the meter.