1. The company needs more manpower or expertise in some area
2. They have a brilliant idea:  Hire consultants!
3. Consultants come in to help.  Since the company either hasn’t the manpower or expertise to do the project, they hand the consultants what they know and have, which isn’t much.
4. Consultants start trying to do the job right (you hope).  They hold meetings, ask questions, gather requirements, start work…
5. Company loses patience.  Needs product quickly, doesn’t want to spend money.
6. Consultants give up on being allowed to do this right.  They hurry.  Requirements gathering sometimes suffers; writing documentation reduces drastically.
7. Consultants hit company’s deadline (if you’re lucky).  Company asks consultants to turn over documentation and do a knowledge transfer to internal staff.  Company gives consultants a meeting (usually a couple of hours) to transfer everything the company’s needs to know about multi-month project to poor guy who may never have even heard of the consultant’s project.
8. Consultant does so and leaves.  Company struggles to maintain what the consultant has done.  Company swears never to hire consultants again.
9. Six months later, more consultants are engaged to redo what the last consultants did.

Sound familiar?  Some of this may sound extreme (or maybe not extreme enough, depending on your experience).  It happens all the time though.  Consultants are a double-edged sword.

A double-edged sword, though, in the right hands, is a very powerful weapon.  So how do you transition from an accident waiting to happen to a grand swordmaster?

The secret, as with most things in life, is practice and discipline.  Here’s tips for succeeding with Consultants:

Plan ahead:  You should have a plan in place as to what activities you believe the consultants need to do when they arrive and for the early period of the engagement at least.  You should go over this plan with the consultants beforehand and gain buy-in, adjust as needed, etc.  Frankly, if you don’t know what you’re going to do with them before they arrive, you shouldn’t be bringing them in yet.

Share Expectations:  First thing when you bring consultants in, give them a quantifiable, measurable explanation of what you need and what you expect of them.  Leave as few things vague as possible.  This will save time on both sides, as it should answer a lot of their questions, and if they weren’t going to ask questions, it will save you the pain of any incorrect assumptions they might have made.

Set the Standard:  Create a system of standards for the type of work the consultants will be doing- coding standards, database standards, data analysis standards, business analysis standards, etc.  You should already have these in place for your existing staff (and if not, you should really be correcting that).  Give these standards to the consultants when they come in-house as part of your expectations.  Just tell them up front:  “This is the way we do things here.  Consistency is important to us, as it helps us manage things long-term.  We appreciate any improvements you can suggest and will consider adding them to our standards, but we do expect you to follow the standards.”  Your people really will appreciate the consistency later, as it will help make the consultant’s work more familiar right away.

Review, Review, Review:  Conduct very regular reviews- code reviews, if they’re developers, document reviews, whatever is appropriate to the work at hand.  It may seem tedious, but a one hour review every week will help save you weeks of work later.  It will help keep the consultant on track with your expectations, assure they do stay within your standards, and the reviews will help you have a better grasp of what they’ve done later.

Feedback is everything:  Don’t review to grade.  Review to provide feedback.  Your consultants want to do the right work.  Regular checking in and providing constructive feedback will help them go in the right direction- and again, it will help you be more familiar with what they’ve done later, when you have to maintain it yourself.

Participation is encouraged:  Some people don’t like consultants to spend too much time chatting with the existing staff, coming to meetings, etc.  After all, they’re (usually) paid by the hour.  The more you can involve the consultants with your culture, though, and let them participate in informal sharing of information, the more they will learn to help them produce better products for you.  The information that they share in turn will help your staff better maintain their work after they’re gone as well.  There’s also countless little things that your staff can learn from the consultant- a quick infusion of new “tricks of the trade” is always good for the shop.

Do you have other useful tips for managing consultants?  Drop them in the comments!

The other day, I interviewed a candidate that asked a blatantly obvious question- one that no one had ever asked before.  It’s so obvious that I plan to incorporate it into all future interviews.  He simply asked “What do you envision my first 90 days to be?  What would I be responsible for?”

We all know from project management that setting expectations at the beginning of a new project is vital.  The sponsor and business owners need to know what they will receive.  Team members must know what they are expected to do.  Why would we not begin a permanent relationship like a new hire the same way?

If I present what my expectations are in the first 90 days during the interview, I do a number of things, including:

• Allow the candidate to get a better grasp of what the job will be about
• Set expectations about how fast the candidate will need to be up to speed and on what things
• Create a sense of direction before the candidate has even started to work for me
• Grant the candidate confidence in my ability to lead and to provide vision and direction (they know already that I have a plan)
• Force myself to plan out the new hire’s future before they arrive (how many times have you hired someone, and you know you need them, but you’re so busy and there’s so much to do that you’re not sure where to point them first?)

I think that this is a terrific practice.  Kudos to the candidate to think to ask this question.  I highly recommend fitting this into your own practice.

1) Hire for attitude, train for skills

Any skill can be learned- that is, if you have the right attitude.  Look for people who are positive-minded, who want to learn.  Ask about their hobbies, how they learned their trade, and ask about major changes in their resume- what programming language did you use at job X?  at job Y?  What did you do to transition to the new language?  People who want to learn and enjoy learning will be glad to pick up new skills for you- in fact, you won’t even need to ask them to.  It’s who they are.

2) Listen to how they talk about their last job

Something obviously went wrong in their last job- they got fired, the pay was too low, there was no room to advance, they hated their boss.  Whatever the reason, people leave jobs because they’re unhappy and want to change things.  People are asked to leave jobs because someone else is unhappy with them.  What the interviewee tells you about the situation and more importantly their attitude about what went wrong will tell you tons about them.  Are they bitter?  Are they willing to talk about what went wrong?  Did they take anything positive away from it?  What did they learn from the situation?

Bad and/or difficult situations will arise for them at your company as well.  It’s just part of life.  How they deal with these things will matter to their growth at your company.

3) Know who and what you want

This one is actually all about you.  Prepare for the interviews by asking yourself exactly what kind of qualities you are looking for.  Ask yourself what skill sets you need.

For attitude, you must consider the type of job you are hiring for.  If you need someone to sweep floors, you frankly are not looking for someone who loves to learn new things.  That type of person will be bored soon, get distracted, not do a good job, and likely move on to something else soon.  You’re looking for someone who is happy with routine and does not care for change.  If you need someone to explore new technologies, you need someone visionary, driven to learn, and who seeks change.  It’s all about what fits the tasks you need the position to perform.

For skill sets, look for parallels to those skill sets just as much as the skill sets themselves.  If you need an object-oriented Perl developer (and I do), that skill set might be hard to find.  Experience in object-oriented programming, however, is not, and there are a number of similar and comparable languages that can transition well- PHP, Python, Java, etc.  Find someone with these skills and the right attitude about learning new things, and you’ll make a good hiring decision.

4) Ask the right questions

Once you have your list of qualities and skills you seek, sit down and make a list of questions.  What can you ask that will lead the person to reveal the qualities that you seek?  Ideally you want them to illustrate through what they say, not tell you.  Ask most people if they are intelligent and willing to learn, and they’ll tell you yes (obviously, since they want the job).  Ask instead about situations and stories that will reveal their relative desire, speed and interest in learning.

5) Take them out for speghetti

I have to admit, of all of these items, I’ve never tried this one.  At interviews, people are usually on ‘interview behavior’.  They have carefully chosen to say and do all that they can to keep control of your image of them.  Perform a brief interview, then take them with you out to lunch or dinner to complete the interview.  Don’t tell them in advance that it’s coming.  Take them somewhere for speghetti or some other relatively messy, sometimes awkward to eat food.  Observe how they handle the unexpected situation.  Some folks will be very cautious and careful.  Some will dig in and ignore manners.  Some will watch you and follow your lead.  Some will simply accept the situation and deal confidently with it.  Depending on the position, one or both of those last two attitudes are generally who you are looking for.  On the job, unpredictable things will occur. You want someone who deals well and graciously with those situations.

These are just a few tools to add to your interviewing bag of tricks.  I would love to hear more- if you have any ideas, add them in the comments!