Sunday, 1 September 2013

Should You Hire Consultants in current Economic Turbulence?

‘Depression’, wrote Thorstein Veblen shortly after the end of the Great Depression of 1873–96, ‘is primarily a malady of the affections of the business men. That is the seat of the difficulty. The stagnation of industry and the hardship suffered by the workmen and other classes are of the nature of symptoms and secondary effects. In such “Depressing” times economists, Government and Business class come together to help the market come out of this phase. There are job cuts, uncertainty, stock market falling downwards. Its like war and there is blood bath in the market and everyone is a loser. In these hard times do you feel organization at macroscopic level, need to hire consultants. Lets analyse together.


Consultation is not an easy job and for organizations, Outsourcing a project definitely carries number of potential risks. Hence we can say that control and risk mitigation are key concerns attached with outsourcing of a project from client perspective. The next step to outsourcing will be to introduce sound contract. Your legal advisor or legal department will clearly play a major role in preparing solid contract.


The first step after signing the contract for consultant is to get the requirement correct which itself is the most challenging job. Requirement is divided into 3 categories. 1. Business requirements 2. User requirements 3. Functional requirements. Business requirements represent the high level objectives of the organization. One can record business requirements in a product and scope document.
Functional requirement document should clearly define the expected outcome/result of outsourcing. The non functional requirements include standards, regulations, quality attribute goals, performance objectives, business rules, and external interface requirements.
In any technical consulting project typical stakeholders include
1.       Users
2.       Customers
3.       Alpha/Beta/Pilot testers
4.       Regulators
5.       Developers



Once the requirements have been defined, the question arises as to how to meet them. There will be many meetings with all the stakeholders and a project plan which includes list of activities will be defined after the necessary approvals of the client. A project manager will be deployed who will be mediator between domains of the user and his core team. In addition to these human resource requirements, important system requirements often derive from other devices or systems in the environment, which require some services of the system or act to constrain the system.From all the above activities we can conclude that nothing can beat human brain. A good resource either outsourced or have been developed internally can define the future of the organization. A good consultant will always be in demand because in consultancy word of mouth along with PR skills are the key reasons to get the next assignment. Also many small medium enterprises fail to understand the importance of consultant as they think they know all or feel it’s expensive to hire external consultant.



Consultants are like best paid guides who can tell whether the organization’s processes are good or bad without getting biased hence any point of time its important for organization to hire good consultant who can study the processes or help organization to grow to next level. If you analyse the reason of failure of any consulting project, it is attributed to personal characteristics of the consultant and client (e.g. lack of skills), technical incompetence (e.g. ineffective project management), bad consultant –client relationship and/or social political aspects of the client organization like hidden agendas, not ready to change. If one works on these issues, it is possible to make consultancy project successful.

Many research organisation feel that every organization should hire consultants. Its very important for any organization whether doing well or not to have third opinion. For organizations which are successful doesn't necessarily need to implement all the suggestions given by consultants. They can keep it for their reference and can monitor the growth and can use it in hard times. For other category of organizations, not successful one - can implement the suggestions and can see the result, because for them it will be do or die.

So guys go for it… Ask consultant’s help, let them grow your organization to next level and create win win situation for all. When you budget your finances, it’s important for you to keep small budget for consulting as well. You don’t need to hire functional expertise as consultant, you can approach your father’s best friend, your best friend or anyone whom you trust and as leader, you feel that this person can be the best guide.