Jason Schwanz dot com

When It’s Good It’s Good

Filed under Technology

When it comes to using a “consultant” for anything, but perticularly with technology consultants, it truly is buyer beware.

I used to work with a guy who, at one point in his career, owned his own consultant company. He very well could have been a really good consultant, but when I worked with him I thought he was just full of himself. He would have been a great consultant with a client who wasn’t technologically confident and needed a lot of direction. He probably would have been horrible with clients who were tech savvy because he would try to dictate rather than work with the in-house people. He probably would also try to force a change of procedures to align it with what he would do rather than what they want done. An example of this was when he was developing a product for use in-house for the company we worked for. He did the initial development according to how he would do things, but the beta testing group wanted it to work a different way. Rather than listening to the beta testers and changing the product to meet the “client” needs he basically told the beta testers that the way it was built is better because of X, Y, and Z. WRONG!!! If you build XYZ, but the customer wants JKL then you give them JKL…or if you can give them RST and that blows them away give them that.

The reason I mention this is because in my current position we are going through a software upgrade this week. I met the consultant that is out doing the upgrade back in March at a conference, and he is quite possibly one of the smartest, and nicest, men I’ve ever met. Nothing is ever assumed, rather I’m asked, “How do you want to handle this? We’ve got a couple of options, which one fits your needs the best?” And on top of that he was able to complete an upgrade that could have taken a full week in 2 days! Yes, you read that right, 2 days. He has a flight to catch tomorrow afternoon, so we’ll be doing some system administration training tomorrow morning…but he started yesterday with a mountain of work and it was done by 6:30p this evening. I am one happy geek