Whose Success?

There is sometimes a quandary between whose success we seek.

Acting as a consultant, you obviously want your own work to be considered successful, so that you will induce others to hire you. Getting there isn't so easy though. We often look downstream to the customer's customers. By helping meet the customer's customers' needs, we hope to make our immediate customers successful. The catch comes when something the immediate customer is doing is preventing them from satisfying their customer- and they don't want to change it. If we make the customer's customer successful at the cost of making the customer unsuccessful, we're probably not going to be successful.

Remember the secrets of consulting- you have to help people learn to solve their own problems, you can't always solve their problems for them. You can be satisfied with your accomplishments, regardless of whether they give you credit. The ideal form of influence is to help the customer see the problem more clearly, but let them decide. Finally, if you want to understand a dysfunctional system, follow the money!

Fewer, better developers

In system development would you rather have more okay developers or fewer but better developers? It depends...inflection point is somewhere in there. It seems like people just say, hmmm, I have the budget to hire five developers. I'll interview for a few weeks and pick the best five. I don't know how well that works in general, but it always causes problems for me.

Even worse is just taking the first person to show up with the right languages on their resumes. That's happened to me quite a bit in the consulting world. Hey- train this new guy, get him up to speed. Three months later, he's still trying to get Word running. Once I was training someone to be the overseas system administrator for a system I had built. I walk over there and she's trying to talk into the mouse. It was a long week of training.

Depending on your needs, you may want a place to train new people. May I humbly suggest not throwing those people out there on consulting assignments? How do you do that as a consultant, where you don't want to put junior people out there? They've got to go out there with mentors and protectors. You've got to have a few big jobs where they get some support. But still it happens to us, where we have people that just end up out there alone on assignment. It can suck even if you are good, but it must be hell when you are not.

Maybe consulting shouldn't be someone's first job...