Part II: How to Make a Consulting Gig Mutually Effective and Rewarding

 Most of what I put down in my previous post, Part I: How to Make a Consulting Gig Mutually Effective and Rewarding, had to do with defining the assignment and preparing for the new consultant. Here are some more suggestions that I have to make.

Make Sure That All Prospective Interviewers Are Prepared.

• Interviewers need to have a current copy of the consultant’s resume. When I’m interviewed about a prospective assignment, I usually have additional copies with my business card and contact information. It’s best to give any prospective interviewers a copy of the resume far enough in advance to go over and assess the fit of the consultant to the assignment.

• Interviewers need to have a current job description for the assignment. The assignment is usually important enough and costly enough to write down a list of what is relevant to the assignment.

• Interviewers need to know what skills and experience are relevant to the assignment. This simply comes down to what parts of the job description are the most important. Sometimes job descriptions contain ‘nice to have’ skills and experience as requirements, and requirements as ‘nice to have’.

• Interviewers need to pursue the technical screening as determining whether the consultant has the required skills and experience but also the capabilities to do the job. This technical screening is not technical oneupmanship, or looking for a weak area on the resume, but assessing the fit to the assignment. They need to look at the intangibles as well, especially where the team will be working with new technology. They need to assess whether the consultant will work to find answers, solve problems and do what it takes to make the project succeed.

• Interviewers need to allow for time for the consultant to ask questions and find out about the job to see whether it’s a fit from his or her perspective. 

Make Sure That the Team Is Prepared to Integrate with the New Consultant.

• Clearly communicate that you, as a manager, expect that they will give the new consultant or contractor full professional cooperation. Sometimes experienced and highly qualified consultants may be threatening to less experienced members of the department or organization. Be on the lookout for defensive denigration (disparagement of the consultant’s credentials, capabilities and experience – which may count in some cases as slander or libel according to the legal definitions), misdirection (deliberately providing false or misleading information and direction), and stonewalling (refusal to provide necessary information and assistance to get the job done) in these cases. Understand that this kind of behavior can sink a project and undermines your ability as a manager to bring in the people that you need to get the job done.

• Make sure that you and others understand that ‘new’ in the case of a consultant does not mean entry level. Experienced consultants often need little more than current standards and guidelines, project requirements and other project documents, a development PC, and access to workstations, servers, etc. They do not need to have team members try to guide them through the basics of how to code, etc. For myself, I try to make sure that beyond the particulars of the corporate environment and project specifications, that I know all that’s needed to fulfill my responsibilities and more.

• Make time for communication with the consultant. As a consultant, I aim to be as ‘low maintenance’ as possible – but that does not mean ‘no maintenance’! Rather, I still need to touch base, and communicate progress, ask questions, make sure that I’m on the right track, etc. My aim in this is simply to make sure that I’m doing the right things and providing what is expected, and, preferably, more than is expected. It’s usually a good idea to have a weekly or biweekly one on one meeting with a consultant. Management by walking around and asking how things are going works well also.

Make Sure That the New Consultant Receives Realistic and Workable Expectations and Assessment.

• Realistic and workable expectations and assessment means sufficient time to complete the assigned task. Experienced consultants can often do much in a short time, but each one of us does require time to produce whatever is being specified. For example, no matter how many years a person codes, no one writes perfect code the first time. What is checked into a source code repository first may not be the final submission but rather simply be to preserve initial attempts against possible loss. Moreover, the code that is produced still needs to be evaluated, unit tested and possibly refactored. The end result is what counts the most. For myself, I aim to produce well designed, documented, understandable and production ready code. I can usually produce this faster than less experienced programmers. But what comes out of the end of my fingers the first time won’t be perfect, although I aim for the end result to fulfill the requirements and functional as possible.

• Realistic and workable expectations means receiving tasks in accord with the skills and experience of the consultant. For instance, I can do a number of support tasks such as installations and defining security roles and users, but I’ve never worked as a network administrator. On the other hand, I’ve worked with some very good manual and functional testers, but I do not consider myself competent to do manual system and functional testing. In fact, my total time for manual system testing over 15+ years of IT experience comes down to maybe 8 hours total. (For more on this, see Joel on Software: Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don't Have Testers.) It’s usually better to try to find someone who is experienced and trained in these tasks rather than try to throw a consultant experienced in other areas at these tasks.

• Realistic and workable expectations and assessment means a method for the consultant to report on his own work. Work out some kind of regular reporting mechanism. In previous assignments I put out a weekly report of my activities where the manager expected one. I’m thinking now that this is advisable in every case, to make sure that the manager gets an accurate understanding of the productivity of the consultant.