Consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they seem to
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I've repeatedly seen the pain of people who do well in consultancies but then go off and get leadership roles at a single company. As a general rule, they are horrible leaders. They'll talk well, make up pretty reports, build elegant org structures that also make up pretty reports, give awesome names to processes that sound like they'd make a real difference... they look and sound like great execs. But they never quite grasp what needs to happen to actually make the business work. So those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us.
Part of it is that they never learned what truly mattered. They have experience swooping in, fixing one pain point, and leaving. They never have to live with the long-term consequences of their decisions. So they never learned what to look for and what to seek or avoid. They never learned depth. They learned how to make a project look shiny for 6-18 months. How it impacted business in 5-7 years wasn't "in scope".
Obviously, this is all generalizations. I'm sure there are exceptional people who came from that environment. But that is exactly what they are - the exceptions to the rule.
* 6 months "learning about what's there" - and often hiring a bunch of their old buddies in to good-paying roles at their new company * 6-12 months making seemingly big changes that amount to nothing (and they hit their cliff!) * 6 or so months skating by until they find their next gig or get canned with a nice severance package
My last place had a guy screw up so horribly he was removed after 9 months BUT for some bizarre reason they kept him on the payroll for 3 more months so he could hit his cliff. All while the rest of us kept things going and tried to make sense of the incomprehensible ramblings of the "team" he'd hired in to manage us.
Incidentally, I discovered that at least one of them had had great success wooing managers he met on https://www.platohq.com/, which seems to be a pay-to-play way to get past HR and interview gates. I should give it a try.
almost certainly a 12 mo. contract of some sorts, or else some sort of termination cause. maybe an "on retainer" fee.
point is, high level executives are in the same bell-curve as all other professions, and it's mostly a cartel.
Possibly negotiated in the contract in advance. Interesting idea
* offshore more dev internally * about 12 months in, lots of things breaking, so move from offshore to outsource * they try to have offshore hand off to outsource, offshore just stop working/caring * with everything in the dump, they move to a different org or leave the company
It was worse than if they were just consultants, as now the people left to clean up the mess still cross paths with those that caused the problem.
1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.
2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.
3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.
I got really good at working on the current engagement at hand, but I never got to stick around and see the impact - for better or for worse. I was missing that critical feedback loop that would help tell me if I needed to course correct what I was doing or how I was doing it. It's also really easy to get super deep into one type of engagement which can severely limit your career mobility if that skillset goes out of style or if companies around you don't have a need for it.
Switched to an engineering role after that and it's been much more constructive to my overall career.
> those of us under them make it work despite all the fluff they layer on top of us
There is something to be said for that - maybe it's not globally optimal but having people under you scrambling to make things work often ends up leading to better outcomes than some other styles of leadrship. It doesn't feel good to be the one working there, but it gets better results than a person who comes and tries to tell people what to do and they all just ignore him. I've seen that too (and been that person). There is some kind of aloofness that servers leaders well but enda up coming across as not doing anything and making everyone else scramble.
This is the root cause of so many problems, execs, politicians and even employees now that personal branding has taken over for everyone have no interest in building things that last past their mandate. We are drowning in shiny novelty and yet organisations and infrastructure are crumbling.
It used to look at the trends of the past 5-10 years, and extrapolate or forward, especially mbas. That hasn’t exactly worked out so well the last 20y due to tech driven change outpacing most everything else.
The saying the tech is the easy part of the equation compared to people seems to put the management consulting lens at the top of the pyramid in some cases.
Sometimes it’s not negative and just the truth of many intelligent lived experiences. If business consulting can be subjective sometimes the response to it might have to be as well to resonate.
There are a couple of general patterns I've seen with them. One is that they tend to be short timers. They are going to put together a 3 to 5 year growth plan with the full knowledge that they won't be here in 3 to 5 years. I've worked on more than a few of these were we present several different models with varying assumptions to a new exec and they then take those models and change them to use incredibly unrealistic assumptions to drive growth numbers that have no basis in reality or any chance of being achieved. This might be fine if the board then tied their options or bonuses to the model, but often they get tied to EBITDA or some similar metric instead.
The problem with using EBITDA is that there are a few ways to grow EBITDA. One, and the one you're going for with these big growth models, is top line revenue growth. The other is by cutting costs. Often cutting costs is much easier. Especially if you're only concerned with short term EBITDA growth, but it can also mean sacrificing long term growth. But these guys don't really care because they won't be there long term.
Working here has given me so much experience on how to manage a project long-term that I probably could’ve never learned anywhere else lmao.
Oh god, I’ve also had to work with some of the worst consultants I’ve ever seen. It’s the first time in my entire career that I’ve ever been tempted to flame someone at work. Watching someone flop around like a fish out of water while trying to do some of the most basic shit is beyond maddening. The nerve of some of these people to try and correct me, too.
Deep breath
Selfish? Maybe. But it reduces the cognitive load of an already mentally draining job and makes me happier on the job.
As an employee, I simply don’t give a damn if I create 10 liabilities in 5 years as I won’t be there in 5 years. Creating $10 of future costs for $1 in profit is a great deal for me.
I want a quick buck, my bonus, and to move on to the next thing.
I don't work that way, and I've been with my company for about 12 years now I think. But after watching the recent tech layoffs, it's pretty obvious that tech companies aren't thinking about their employees futures, just the present. The ones that don't give a generous severance are the worst, but even with that it can be rather difficult to find a new job... Especially one that you like.
Many, many companies think of employees merely in terms of the money, and not how they're disrupting that person's life. It doesn't surprise me that there are non-managers that think and act the same way towards the company.
You look at how companies are operating, how they are treating employees, how they are chasing short-term financial performance over long-term sustainability and simply mirror their behavior on an individual level.
Personally, I am only invested in a company to the degree of making my immediate coworkers happy and making it easier for them to do work. I don't care about the long term (5-10 year timeline) success of the strategic goals for 2 reasons:
1. The company is not invested in me in the long term.
2. I don't have strategic visibility to make improvements anyway, because I am not an executive, so it makes no sense to worry about something I can't control.
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years" - "not here because you 100% won't increase pay commensurate with market rate"
Its relatively simple to see how people could operate that way, because companies don't actually care about employees. They're a line item for profit generation.
Would a company cut quality to increase profit? Yes? Then so should you.
I'm not really worried about what other people do because when I have to fix it, I'll be being paid to, and so would the next guy after me.
If companies don't feel responsible for treating employees well/not turning their backs on them in the sake of profit then I feel 0 responsibility for anything I leave behind when I'm gone.
Sounds like the solution is to look for a good company—they do exist—not sabotage the current one.
Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.
You could choose to stop the cycle instead of biting the next person down the line just because you were bitten by someone unrelated.
> Whether or not the guy before me leaves a pile of crap behind is not determined by me.
Maybe not directly, but it does play a part. When no one cares about doing things right, even the ones who did care get fatigued and stop. The way to fix the situation is to be better yourself, thus giving others the chance to be at their best.
Sucks to be the guy cooperating in this scenario, but it's the only way to start clawing things back from the brink.
In a typical F500 setting strategy consultants aren’t on-hand to make anything better or improve anything meaningfully - in general consultants are on hand to validate a C or C-1’s personal belief and drive its execution. Why?
First, this is what keeps these companies around. You don’t keep a client by telling them they’re wrong or ignorant. Two, buying the big three name is essentially idea laundering. “It’s not a land grab, Bain said said we had to do it.” “McKinsey told us we had to hollow out that one plant town to survive!” They’re also an emotional refuge and a great backchannel. The BCG principal talks to the CEO weekly, you might not, good to be on their good side.
Look, I’m sure in certain niche, high-skill consultants (industrial process engineering?) are valuable. By random dart method they’ve probably driven a fair amount of value, but on average you should never let them in the door.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2022/11/25/french...
I completely agree with you, but if everyone knows this, then why does this ploy work?
Bringing in consultants essentially gives you the ability to say "we vetted it, and it sounds like a low-risk approach". This means you can sell it to the board, to other exec's, sell it to the rank and file, etc. And if it fails, you can blame it on KPMG or Bain or whoever. "Bain said it was cool" is a perfectly valid excuse.
Spending $300k to CYA and protect your $600k bonus is a terrible choice for the company but a fantastically rational choice for an individual executive.
Especially when the $300k isn't your money and might not even be coming out of your department's budget.
One can even avoid unpleasant disagreements with peers simply by hiring an equivalently prestigious firm and positioning the consultants to fight it out.
And on the biggest existential question on the viability of their entire venture, I think they completely whiffed. Likely just told them what they wanted to hear so the project would move forward. Last I read, it has been an absolutely enormous write down for a company previously known for being invincible.
Did the consultants know the process? No! But they managed to extract the information from multiple people, combine it into an actual working process and present it back to the people and us, so we could actually implement any of it.
This is a pretty good combination that is actually hard for many people to do, especially when you’re in the business trying to keep the lights on.
Not all management consultants are good of course, there is an awful lot of bullshit, but I’d hire from the pool for full time employees focused on improving processes or solving hard business problems.
In most cases, at the outset they don’t have more knowledge than the client though.
Disclosure: I used to work at McKinsey
Only a C suite or a mgmt consulting firm could possibly believe that.
There's a reason nothing ever permanently changes after mgmt consultants prescribe it.
No VCS. Badly modeled domain. Code complexity. Denormalized tables galore. Cludged together OTS and custom components. Esoteric language choices. Code rot. Bad branching choices. Monolithic and brittle codebase. No CICD. No testing. No specs. Rotten confluence pages that weren't kept up to date.
And then, the worst: Domain priests that use complicated domain knowledge and rules and self-inflicted complexity to keep the software hostage by telling us we can't fix the above problems. Essentially job security.
why don't the consultants just cut out the middleman and take over these billion dollar industries if it's so easy? Why bother consulting for tech companies if they can just put them out of business with a direct competitor? Domain expertise apparently doesn't matter, should be easy for these expert managers
The number of companies that have gone bankrupt or been disrupted due to short term optimizations recommended by these management consultant companies is massive
No, programmers/engineers/etc. are equally susceptible: https://xkcd.com/1831/
Related:
Its such a common theme in modern businesses.
If not, then the advice you got could be summarized as "figure out what you're being paid to do and do it."
McKinsey in particular have a lot of controversy. So much so that googling for "mckinsey controversy" to refresh my memory brought in several different scandals from the one I was thinking of. Here's them and the French state: https://www.philonomist.com/en/article/mckinsey-origins-scan... , which seems similar to what the OP article is talking about. Here's a more general summary: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-many-times-mckinsey-ha...
The risk with management consultants is that they tell management what they want to hear. This is great for customer satisfaction and repeat business. It's just that occasionally this causes real problems.
This is a feature. You get outside expertise that recommends cost cutting and reducing staff. It’s not your fault though, the expensive consultants with the nice suits were the ones recommending it!
A lot of Big-4/management consultancy, revolves around hiring bright young people straight out of University and sending them into large companies with, at best, a canned methodology, and access to some more experienced people to ask questions of.
Yes you might have junior staff coming in to ask questions, but there is always someone more senior briefing the junior and reviewing their work.
The growth that a graduate experiences in the first 2 years of their career is enormous.
It's also very important to distinguish between consulting and assurance services. Both within a big 4, offer very different services and offerings.
The only “knock” I could see is the presentations could be a bit formulaic and slightly too polished, which is hardly damning.
The presentations? Is that all you got for it? Is that the only or the most important outcome? I would say that's nothing. It's the actual implementation that counts and is difficult. It's as if a consultant would present in a powerpoint how to implement a piece of software and then leave it up to you to implement it and you have to hit and solve all the road blocks along the way. And on top of it they come up with that presentation without even having implementing anything similar themselves.
The current Big 4 accounting firms do have management consulting divisions (not separate entities to my knowledge)
I love hiring new grads.
Disclosure: former consultant
Surprising to see how people react when a company does use lots of junior staff. The difference being is that these junior staff are client facing as opposed to being behind the scenes.
Unfortunately..... that's often (IME ofc) not the case. The financial model and incentives for these companies is to staff with as junior people as they can get away with.
Maybe at a body shop like Accenture though.
https://thehustle.co/hertz-accenture-consulting-website-laws...
[0] Yes, yes, I know Accenture have developers and development teams, but look at their history with publicised software development projects: it's not exactly a road paved with glittering diamonds of crystallised glory. I'm not suggesting Accenture are irredeemably awful at everything they do but it's evidently the case that software development isn't really their oeuvre even though they do seem to do quite a lot of it.
Plenty of people, including those with prestigious titles, who are detached from the reality of software development. In some cases they "hire some geeks" to solve a problem a big company already solved, and like in this case there are other times where they hire some big company with an official sounding name because, surely, they can get things done.
Honestly, it gives me hope that my job as a web developer won't be wiped out by AI too soon. There's enough foolish management types out there hiring the wrong humans to work on futile projects that I figure I have at least another 5 years before I have to resort to food delivery or basket weaving.
Example 1: Pharma company wants to roll out SAP Payroll system
Example 2: Telco wants to roll out billing system
The problem with these situations is that:
- SAP experts rarely want to work at a Pharma company
- Billing system experts rarely want to work at a Telco
- The company should not hire -- and then after a year, fire -- workers after a specific job (e.g., SAP implementation) is done. Also, if the company is in the middle of nowhere, and the job is only for a year or two, why would anyone relocate there?
- You cant become an expert by being at one company and seeing it done (and fail) once. You become an expert by doing it at many places
- You cant hire a bunch of recent grads and do these projects, they require mentorship from people who have done these projects many times. The consultancies provide that.
That's the way it should be - the problem is it's impossible to vet the consultancies that actually have that expertise against the consultancies that claim the experience and are good at using smoke and mirrors to trick somebody into thinking they have it.
https://www.sap.com/partners/find.html
https://pf-prod-sapit-partner-prod.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand...
Obviously this works for popular packages with defined success criteria, but that is a lot of business for consultancies already, and i'd argue, a great reason to go with a consultancy.
I believe that senior sales representatives from consultancies have a keen sense to detect this professional anxiety and leverage it to sell their services and put the manager's mind at ease, regardless of the quality of the consultancy's services.
While it may seem that consultancies know less than they claim and cost more than they appear to, managers may still seek comfort in their reassurances and take legal action if things go wrong.
NYC has huge problems with transit capital projects because they basically have zero in-house expertise, from project planning down to digging the tunnels. This despite having decades of multiple continuous projects going since the 90s and onwards. It's all outsourced, and the state gets ripped off because they don't have the capacity to plan, or to cross check the outsourced plans, etc.
In tech you see this all the time when senior management wants to move into some area that isn't a core competency and brings in their buddies outsourcing consulting body shop. The POC period skates by because everyone implicitly understands the consultant was brought in from the top. They then outsource the actual work to a 24 year old in a shiny US office to project manage 10 offshore 24 year olds. No one has any idea what they are doing, nothing gets done, and a few million go out the door.
When it comes to consulting, I don't have direct personal knowledge but from what I gather from cousins I grew up with who did work for McKinsey and smaller, more niche firms, it's really the same issue presented in a different context as the issue of clients picking the lawyer with the best jingle (Cellino and Barnes, anyone?) instead of the actual most competent lawyer, since clients almost never have the frame of reference required to even understand what sort of metrics they should be looking at, and if that data is even available and where to get such data. It's a bit like advanced metrics versus back-of-the-card metrics in baseball. I always practiced defense, never civil work (admin/criminal only), and in a variety of state and federal jurisdictions where the need was greatest and resources lacking. In part it's because I find IP work distasteful and frequently petty, even though it was a subject matter I was well versed in enough to get offers of employment at even though I literally never wrote for law review and interned only in criminal defense. With that comes with the territory where essentially by the time I got my limited license right after my second year's finals ended I was already racking up bar complaints and paid internship offers at about the same rate, since other attorneys noticed really quickly that I had a useful affinity with tech generally but especially in spotting evidentiary bullshit in computer crime prosecutions and those involving cell phone forensics. It didn't hurt that the first time I sat at the attorney's table in a felony trial I had the facebook data of every juror in the pool that was public - and in 2012 just about everything was public - and managed to get a hung jury, which just ended up with the prosecutor waiting until I was back in class to do the retrial on the same evidence and ending up with a first degree murder conviction. Literally all I did was focus on using preemptory challenges on those who are openly either related to, friends with, or had positive comments about the police who nevertheless claim to be impartial - not exactly rocket science or learning Brainfuck. By the time I graduated I had recorded a ridiculous number of internship/externship hours, managed to get several CFAA counts dropped on computer crime related cases only to have the jury convict on wire fraud anyway, and got not-guilty verdicts in around 10% of all cases that did go to trial, which was followed by sometimes weekly bar complaints filed against my supervisor and I for not being able to use black magic to jedi mindtrick the jury or something. If this was baseball, I'd have a 1-10 record but witha BABIP of .800 or something since before 2021, defending against a CFAA criminal charge was ludicrously difficult thanks to the law being drafted pre-internet by senators who watched Wargames starring Matthew Broderick, which was also released half a decade before I was born. One can never tell if the police and prosecutor really didn't understand technology or were just intentionally screwing with the court by presenting gibberish evidence and hiring incredibly incompetent experts, but at one point during cross I realized that the police officer testifying did not understand DHCP and so the entire basis for attribution was based on an assumption that open hotspots assigned permanent IPs to clients connecting, full stop. We lost the case anyway since wire fraud was an even easier charge to convict on. Even today, just reading dockets and filings and receiving the occasional (and always baseless) DMCA notice by way of Github, it appears that not only are prosecutors hiring experts without expertise, but in civil cases, large companies - particularly in DMCA related litigation - are hiring attorneys who don't know how CDNs work at all and are conducting ridiculous direct and cross examinations or making nonsensical jurisdictional claims that actually end up undermining their own cases. Since the standard for jurisdiction is purposeful availment of service within the jurisdiction, basing jurisdiction on geolocating a CDN IP from your office will obviously come back with one in the US, even though the defendant, who is almost always overseas, would have the exact opposite view if they showed up in court to defend themselves, not to mention that since CDNs aren't hosting the content through intentional selection of server location but a caching-based automated process, every time the court goes in depth on the meaning of purposeful availment, the purported copyright holder is essentially sabotaging the viability of their future cases while arguing to nobody currently.
Hell, I got a DMCA notice from a white shoe fancy IP firm that predicated its takedown notice on my use of the word "scrape" which then proceeds to misstate the fact, the law, and showed blatant lack of knowledge of even the word "hosting". For the record, "scrape" does not have a legal definition under the cited statute and there's no case law in either jurisdiction that would make the word itself the basis for a claim of infringement per se. Actually, I'm pretty sure they didn't even look at the code I wrote and may have even inadvertently claimed copyright on something they only had a license to, while another part of the claim may be an admission of a prima facie violation of the CFAA as interpreted post van Buren. Since the code in the repo is meant to fix the shitty app they bought that basically was impossible to use, I'm not counter-noticing it officially since the remedy for that is just restoring the repo and if they want their paying customers to not be able to use functionality they paid for, so be it. But if a company the size of the NY Times is able to hire legal representation that is so incompetent to a degree where I've seen pro se petitions by prisoners that are better informed than the notice that certainly was billed at a rate that cost about as much the entire misdemeanor representation of a low level assault charge that goes to trial, clearly there wasn't anything close to oversight or due diligence applied. I doubt any attorney would risk their bar card to defraud the court in such a blatant manner, I can only surmise that it's incompetence, aided by the fact that lawyers who code and know the specific law and have specific experience with the law is likely a small group, but I know personally some very competent and in fact some very good IP attorneys in NYC. But if a corporation this size can't adequately figure out who's actually good at what they purport to do, I guess it's many times harder for the individual.
(Although really it's not. Consults are typically free, and simply asking every attorney you consult who they'd hire if they're in your shoes and crowdsource those actually practicing is usually enough to figure out who to hire)
What is the value the "link aggregator indirection provide" but a log of noise from the twitter thread?
Btw. I love Mariana Mazzucato's books. Can recommend.
I've seen consultants hired for projects where everyone on the team (including leadership) basically knew what to do or what needed to be done, but they were only, say 75% certain about it. In a normal startup, they would've just done it, failed fast, moved on. But in a bigger corporate (non-startup) environment where they didn't know if their jobs would be on the line for taking risks, they could bring in consultants to verify but mostly echo back what they already wanted to do. Plus they come with certificates and stuff so everyone in the chain assumes that's worth something.
The sad part is that it shouldn't be this way. Consulting could and really should be highly valuable.
In the times that I have done consulting work, I have tended to both make pretty good money and deliver far more value to my clients than I cost them.
However, the factors that make that work seem pretty hard to commodify in the ways needed for a corporation to turn it into a business model, so consulting companies tend to optimise for being believable bullshit factories.
Hello ChatGPT!
You HAVE to believe they bring in value because... well, you gotta believe.
Management consultants are useful in a few ways: 1) you get a dedicated team that works full time on some issue and 2) you get people who have seen how a lot of other companies have done things.
And the result of this at companies I've worked at that had management consultants change process was to just bolt on some processes with adaptations to the business, selling it as "BigCorp™ does it this way and you should too" which eventually backfired when these reorgs and processes don't pan out because they were made for the needs of BigCorp™, not the business they are consulting in.
There is loads of cargo culting from management consultancies.
It was a tough job to do fairly because as an engineer our natural inclination is to miss the context and only see the bad.
And it's tied into issues with hiring and retention of staff so that's interesting as well.
Having said that I don't want anything to do with either side of the interaction. Happy to hear other peoples stories.
There are some people who are exceptionally talented at making something from nothing, knowing how to apply the first steps towards a goal quickly and with great confidence and take great care to sow the seeds of sustainability and success into a project.
A exceptional Consultant is basically like “The Wolf” in Pulp Fiction.
Moving the needle from zero to ten (correctly and sustainably) is difficult. Getting it from ten to ninety is easy. Getting it from ninety to one hundred is almost a perpetual state.
Consultants enjoy the perspective that working on a single project for 10 years is effectively spending a quarter of one’s career on a single project. To consultants, the life of the tenacious, loyal, unquestioning worker bee is naive and wasteful.
The "main" job of a consultant was to find new business; for that, they got bonuses. For doing the job the client hired them for, they did not get bonuses.
Unsurprisingly, jobs went on forever. There was no benefit to a consultancy firm in completing a contract; that would mean the end of the line for the gravy-train. So projects lasted years.
This was a couple of decades ago; I hear less about technical consultancies these days, so perhaps the world has moved on. But I used to feel sorry for companies that had allowed a technical consultancy to get a foot in the door.
Over time I've come to realize that it's less the what and more the who. That is, if the company could do it themselves they would. But internal politics and such make the needed what too difficult.
I work at a (small) company now that desperately needs some "outside influence." Anyone who speaks up interally is marginalized. At this point, no one speaks up. The level of dysfunction is impossible. I can't imagine things changing without outside help.
Probably not. IT has its own procedures for enforcing process compliance [1] that are much less susceptible to deviation and much more efficient.
It's ok if you fail to capture something and need to use less effective methods like checklists. But going to them by default or, like the GP's said, only using them are bad.
(But anyway, the GP was complaining because he was expecting highly valuable customized advice, and instead he got low-value process adherence checks. How you do your adherence checks is a completely different subject.)
I love when people just add comment for pure sake of commenting. The auditing companies don't get a "cyber security expert" with 40 years of experience, but get undergrads, suit them up and sell them as experts. Because of the checklists, that without knowing anything about the context, are almost useless and generate mostly noise.
Auditing companies absolutely get cyber security experts. Graduates coming out of University obviously don't have the experience of that of veterans but are in a team of experts with experience in that area.
The checklists and workpapers are a way to ensure that there is a level of standardisation in the work that is being performed. If you have assessed a clients firewall or operating system as a veteran you are encouraged to replicate how you did that in a work paper or checklist to cover bases.
Big 4 auditing firms are some of the best in class when it comes to knowledge sharing. Yes sometimes a junior or a senior might miss something without the context, but that is why humans developed lips to talk through it.
I can't count the amount of times I have challenged what a junior has said, or the conclusion a junior has come to based on what a client has said based on my experience.
I was once a graduate myself and found many glaring gaps through the use of simple checklists. If that's all it takes, then the industry needs to write some of their own.
No I don't know what a VMM is but it's probably not relevant.
Love tools that help, eg checklists, when used right.
But over time they have a very strong tendency to become set-in-stone dogma, at which time they will create a priesthood and a very large dead zone where thinking and flexibility is no longer allowed.
Bonus points: Critical stuff like meraki licensing or certificates that could be solved with a simple calendar.
This stuff is 90% organizational skills and 10% technical skills. My job as a consultant is mostly on the same level as helping people wash their hands. The typical HN person is used to being on skilled technical teams at companies that build technology as their business, but let me tell you that all your business software consumers are constantly in a dire state from top to bottom.
In large global financial audits, there are many complex accounting systems that run on Unix systems. These systems as part of the financial audit are audited to ensure there is an appropriate level of IT general controls that support the underlying financial statements. I.e. what's stopping the admin from making direct data changes to the underlying database that supports the financial statements.
Furthermore, those traditional accounting firms (Big 4) no longer and haven't for a decade + only provided accounting. These firms have enormous skills in internal audit, governance risk and controls, data science, cyber security, Information Technology etc.
PHB: "But you're a consultancy"
Dogbert: "Ironic, isn't it?"
Many of them are great at creating fancy diagrams and design documents, some of them are good at communications, but I have yet to find them that can deliver any real quality code in the end before they move to their next project somewhere else.
I will avoid consultants, along with contractors in software field as much as I can.
This is at multiple levels, from low-level IC, to strategic high-level IC and mid-management. At every level within an org they haven't delivered value from my perspective.
Maybe if I were a CXO I'd feel differently.
Didn't have the heart to tell him his firm is supposed to bring expertise from day one.
In a previous job, there were several hired people, two DBAs among them. They were almost part of the furniture, but everybody seemed happy with the arrangement. Their IT consultancy company sent a fat bill every month, and the VP of IT could move part of the personnel costs to another part of the ledger, which made the CFO happy.
I guess it takes two to tango.
"Consultants borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then keep the watch".
- Carl Ally