After years the grief and complaints of the external consultants get worse and worse. There is still enough work for nearly everybody but in reality the wrong people are in the wrong place. The top cause of the malaise are the recruitment agencies that are often totally incompetent to match requirements.

Failure Pattern: Staffing and Choosing the Consulting Services

An excerpt from the "Anatomy of IT Failure"

IT projects like the big SAP implementations are in there vast majority highly pioneering projects. Enterprises who wish to implement an ERP suite typically do not have the manpower to realistically staff the necessary positions out of their own power nor do they have sufficient in-house competence to define the necessary Standard Operation Procedures and Standard Emergency procedures that are needed for a fail-safe implementation and a realistic budget planning.

There are essentially two big categories of IT projects that differ in all important measures like implementation strategy, crew characteristics, project methodology, risk management, test and verification approach, compliance requirements and post-life maintenance. The main difference is the repeatability and indeed practiced repetition of the applied procedures. One category is mass- and series production while the other instance is individually tailoring and confectioning a rough-cut on demand. Implementing a database or an operating system is mass production while making SAP real is measure tailoring.

Windows server farms or database engine rollouts are well-defined procedures that define a sequence of distinct steps that need to be executed in sequence to make the product work. We would call them cookbook and they are based on the repeatability of the procedures and their recipes. Logically this is only possible when those procedures are applied to their target over and over again – without changing the procedures from case to case. Such works fall under the category of "Commodity Projects" that are executed following a strict implementation and go-live strategy in the shape of a Waterfall Project Plan.

Implementing ERP projects like SAP and SOA missions differ essentially. They are campaigns rather than commodity projects. Their characteristic is that they are highly individual while based on a canonical "standard" kernel. Nearly nothing of the core concepts of a waterfall style project plan suitable for commodities fit to campaigns. Implementation methodology must be based on agility to cope with a nearly 100% level of uncertainty. The strategies used here are called depending on context: convergence or confluence to reflect the difference to waterfall; agile to stress the responsiveness to uncertainty; scrum to stress the importance of then human factor and emotional intelligence over subject expertise; Hologramming or Synergetics to express the potential holistic impact of even the smallest decision.

The disaster of project failure can be nearly always be traced back to applying commodity procedures to campaign style missions. It is just as ridiculous and harmful like exploring the jungle with an air-conditioned sports car. In order to be just to everybody: the other way round is true as well. Agile methods have no place in pure commodity projects like a bush knife is inappropriate to carry in Manhattan (unless you are Crocodile Dundee).

The Seven Death Sins of Recruitment

When you do an anatomy of failure there are a small number of patterns that cause the disaster. I like to call them Mortal Sins, aren't they often enough the root cause of all mischief.

Blind Bids

It is a common in public services and many large industry companies use this common practice. There primary goal is to handle large numbers of bids on a single offer. But blind bids require that the bids are comparable. You can do this when you buy commodity products like a red van" or require a commodity service like installing an operating system. Recruiting of IT specialists does not fall under this category. They are humans and they are so different. There is hardly a specialist to be found that can comply with all requirements of a job offer: they need to be subject experts but also suit into the project; but being a subject expert is not identical of being a subject expert. One know more than the other; some know well he product the others know also the business. A right blend of both is what you need.

The suggested alternative is making "open bids". You invite all candidates at the same time to a conference and discuss with them the project. That way you can get a complete different impression of skills and their ability to fit the team. In the end you pick a crew from the candidates. Normally all not suitable candidates voluntarily retire during the session through own insight. It has also been proven as being successful to bring in a neutral moderator for the onsite session, so that you can concentrate on observing rather than mediating the people and also get an outside view complementing your impression.

In case you have too many applications you may shortlist the candidates based on a pre-test. Suitable procedures would be asking all candidates to send a short essay via email describing how they understood the project description and what they believe they can offer as exclusive contribution. This email communication must not be routed via an agency but rather go directly between the candidate and the staffing responsible. It will be mainly the form of the reply that gives you the criteria and not so much the real and alleged hard facts in the email. If you ask for a short email you can rule out those who reply with a long email as well as those who cannot write proper sentences at all.

Getting the Crew Aboard Before the captain

After seeing hundreds of Hollywood and Bollywood movies it should be an instinct to get the boss on board before the crew. When a ship owner wants a crew he never goes buying a crew first, but rather searches the responsible Captain and the captain's first duty is to find his personal crew. Only in IT and mainly due to the bad Influence of recruiting agencies captain and crew are recruited simultaneously. This waives the essential competence that a captain can contribute to the selection process and the necessity that above all the captain must be able to work with the people during the full mission.

First recruit the captain and then discuss with the captain the requirements. If the captain cannot tell how his team need to look like, you better drop the captain before trusting him your ship.

Picking Raisins

Often freelancers suggest presenting already established teams. They have been done projects before together and want to continue the successful cooperation. For fear of corruption some companies do not want this. Worse the case when some agency offers a full team based on a mixed price calculation for a full functioning and strong team. But when you decide picking the best only, the whole calculation collapses. What you get is not a team of the best consultants but most probably a collection of divas who are all barely satisfied because their pay is below what you expect. They will spend most of the time worrying to find a better job for themselves and their friends.

Relying or Even Demanding Certification

Certifications are meant to sort the crap from the corn. Unfortunately the certificates that are offered by most of the product vendors and certification institutes are seldom worth the paper they are printed on. Be it a Certified SAP/IBM/Oracle Consultant or a Microsoft Certified Engineer, they only give proof that the person has read enough about a certain product. Truth is, however, that most certificates can be easily achieved without any practical training. What makes things worse is that the real experienced practitioners would hardly find time to go for an examination class. This leads to a situation where the good ones lack of certification while the certified league is a gang of inexperienced youngsters and theoreticians. Vendor certification should be treated as what they are: a cash cow for the product vendors and a motivation for younger students to learn a topic against a goal. They are definitely no indicator about qualification or disqualification of a consultant or developer. If someone has multiple certificates the honest question is: did this guy ever work for money and on a real project or did she/he spend the time in the classroom only. Trusting in certifications leads necessarily to rejecting the real good consultants.

Suggestion: Ignore certificates during the staffing and decision making process.

Insisting in Fulltime Only

Many external consultants are entrepreneurs and do not want to be treated like employees. Once they successfully finished a project they often offer spot-consulting and occasional maintenance to their former clients. Real good brains do not sell time but knowledge and consequently expect to be paid a higher hourly rate than those who definitely cater for less value. It is not an argument to lower the rate if you offer them to work more hours. They want the flexibility to service more than one customer. In addition a good consultant works with the internal leaders of your enterprise who are seldom available at any moment. It would be a waste of money to force the consultant to be present five days a week just for the sake of being present.

Suggestion: If you look for good people and an even better service, it is wise to ask for terms like 50% plus, meaning that you the advisor will dedicate an average of 50% of his available time with the option to increase to whatever workload are necessary during periods of stress.

Declining Remote Work

Even if some project leaders have not yet known: consultants have a live next to their profession. They have such things like family, cats and dogs, club memberships, political engagement and obligation and much more. Typically they run an own business and requires them to handle requests or do occasional accounting. That is why they ask for a nice blend between remote and on-site work. If you deny them this balance they may spend many hours in doing private works on the laptop or phone calls to manage the own company. The real good consultants are so high in demand that they will not accept your offer under these circumstances.

Suggestion: If a consultant asks for, allow them this option if this is OK with the work. In most cases remote work is fine and the consultants normally know very well to find a good balance between what they can do at home and what is better done on-site.

Recruiting via Recruitment Agencies

Agencies and their contribution to project failure deserve a complete and very long chapter on its own. In brief: the majority of staffing agencies are the real culpable for project failure. They are not helpful for finding the right people. "What do the agencies do? They receive requests from a client. Typically the recruiter calls himself a consultant, but in reality seldom has an idea what the client is really asking for. So they do what they can do: keyword matching against a database. Very few recruiters have the fantasy and practical background to be able to match a real CV against a requirement when the keywords do not match. If you asked for a GTS consultants they would not find the "Global Trade Solution" experts in the database and will also not understand that an expert in "Tax, Customs and Excise" may be the superior consultant in that case. They will not dare to suggest a developer who worked ten years in the paper industry as a suitable candidate for the steel sector.

Eventually the only criterion a recruiter understands is the price. That way, recruiters filter illicitly the talents and offer you the cheap list only. Worse of all recruiters are looking for the total benefit. If a 100% consultant would be a 100% skill match but openly declines to work more than three days a week, the recruiter will rather offer you a far less experienced body that is willing to bill a full week; it simply gives a better commission for the recruiter.

We fully understand that many companies require a preferred supplier strategy to handle the accounts. That was the main reason how all the agencies came in to being. There are economic, tax and legal reasons for handling external staff that way, so they often cannot be avoided. But there is no necessity for any company to outsource the staffing process to an agency as well.

And here is one more argument that mainly relates to larger publically held companies. If the examples here are not convincing enough then an enterprise should mind the following: delegation of staffing to an agency is an extension of your essential supply chain. In case your company is subject to compliance rules you need to include the agency in your permanent quality and compliance audits according Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 9000 and all the others that apply to your enterprise. I have not heard of any company that permanently audits the recruitment agencies. The mere fact that the agency is ISO-9000 certified is worth nothing since it does only audit the internal processes but says nothing about the compliance with the client's processes. In brief: recruiting via a staffing agency spoils in most cases the validity of your internal certified processes.

Suggestion: Ideally you hire one or two freelance consultant that you trust as captain and ask him to find the crew. Good and seasoned freelance engineers are so well woven into peer networks that they are able to link the right people. After the people have been found the captain chooses one or more from the preferred supplier list that is then asked to act as a single umbrella for the external people. Read also the chapter on "blind bid" to see how you effectively staff a good crowd. Your captain will definitely staff less but better people than an external self-acclaimed consultancy.

Alternatively hiring a smaller consultancy with no more than 100 employees with a track record of having participated in implementation processes in your industry sector is another option. They will also need to add more people from external sources but due to their competence in the subject matter they have no problem in sorting the good from the bad.

How to avoid failure

After years the grief and complaints of the external consultants gets worse and worse over the years. There is still enough work for nearly everybody but in reality the wrong people are in the wrong place. The top cause of the malaise are the recruitment agencies that are often totally incompetent to match requirements.