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Comment by leeter | Hacker News Reader

This 100%, I've literally been hired onto a client to basically tell management something their internal team had been saying for ages. The challenge wasn't telling management that; but rather getting them to (politically very carefully) open their eyes to the fact they had the solution (and the people to implement) right in front of them the entire time. That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trust their team at all. So most of our time was spent untangling that and doing a little implementation.

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There's a saying: 'No one is a prophet in their village/town'.

When the same info you communicate internally comes from an 'external' and 'credible' source, all of the sudden the message gets through.

Pretty frustrating for the 'internal' people.

The original phrase comes from Jesus in Matthew 13:57

And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2013:56...

Actually an old french saying: "Nul n'est prophète en son pays"

Don't know if its derived from the verse you mention.

They mean the same thing, of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_propheta_in_patria

Nice saying.

Yeah, this is pretty universally the job of a management consultancy: interview the staff, and report what they're saying.

They're also the "legit" channel for corporate espionage (or, research sharing, if you prefer), especially for processes and such. They didn't make up that "best practice" they're teaching you now—they stole it from your competitor. They'll figure out if you're doing anything better than them and clue them in on their next engagement. And the wheel keeps on turning.

The essence of consulting business is that if you ask a consultant what the time is, they take your watch, look at it, tell you the time, and keep the watch.

On the other hand, there is real value unlocked by simply getting information from team A to team B in a dysfunctional organization that is totally unable to do it themselves; and most large organizations are dysfunctional in this sense.

Exactly that. I work for an agency that was bought by global consulting conglomerate. This gave me insight into the workings at global companies that hire consultancies.

At first I really didn't understand why these global companies shelled out this much money for consultants until I understood that more often than not it is the lines of communication these consultants open up.

They make it possible for information to flow from one stratified silo into another. For IT to talk to marketing and marketing to talk to product. And so on.

Not that I really enjoy the political side and the PowerPoint side of the job, but at least I understood some things better.

I'm not sure I can agree with the word "stole." It's clearly in everyone's interest that that process goes on, or at least the interest of everyone who hires consultants; if a company was uniformly better than all of their competitors or thought they were, they wouldn't hire external consultants.

Yeah, I intended that a bit tongue in cheek. Of course everyone knows what's going on, though to some extent they pretend not to.

There's a (humorously) fine line between the apparent antipodes of pretending not to know something and thinking that it's such universal common knowledge that there's no need to discuss it. :-)

Good for consumers, in some cases, I'd say.

Interviewing staff ("stakeholders") at a customer is always fascinating. I've seen the full range from sincere gratitude at being listened to, through to open hostility and suspicion. The latter was much worse when I was younger and worried about impressions I was making on older-but-not-very-senior people. At some point you just stop giving a shit and let them hate you if they feel threatened.

This too, we're a technical consultancy (DevOps) so we get the gamut of reactions from "You're on my turf" to "Finally someone that my boss will listen to". Getting the former early on severely hurts your chances of success sadly.

Edited for spelling

You've probably meant 'turf' instead of 'terf'. Thanks to that I've learnt something new today.

The interview has to be scoped right. Sometimes they get scoped too broadly and people will offer opinions about processes of which they don’t have a complete understanding and can lead them to saying things that are not germane and sidetrack other teams.

Haha, I checked this against my internal memories from 'Office Space'.

"So... what would you say... ya do here?"

I had a boss who said, "a manager is someone who tells you the time with your own watch."

> That was a very tricky situation as the management didn't trust their team at all

I think this is usually the root issue: management doesn't trust the team, and the team thinks management is out to get them.

Another classic Weinberg...

So a consultant’s job is to ameliorate incompetent management?

No, it is to fix problems. Sometimes management is the problem. Sometimes it is not. You can put the pitchfork away

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