A consultant is usually good at something specific. For example, if they are an ERP consultant, they are usually really good at a couple of specific ERPs at the most. Usually focused on one ERP and when you hire them, that is the ERP that you have already chosen to use. So they can help set up the accounting, and create some reports, and maybe even are able to customize the ERP for you.
I bring up ERP because that is one of the most prevalent consultancies that we utilized while I was a Director of IT.
They had a guy that was good with accounting and he helped get the accounting things in the new ERP. They had a report guy that was pretty good at creating customized reports and a little customization here and there.
What I was able to do as someone with experience in a lot of areas of technology was help to speed that process along. Even though I had never heard of that ERP platform before taking the job, and I was not expected, nor, it was thought, needed, to help with the implementation. It became clear to me that this job was taking much longer than it should be.
I dove into the subject matter. Immersed myself in the process (that started a whole year before I was hired, and had dragged on the 6 months I was there already, and had no end in sight) and started working with the consultants.
It became very clear, very quickly, that the main consultant working with us had a problem with listening to the people who were experts in OUR business. He was an expert, presumably, in whatever field he came from dealing with ERPs for that type of business, but we had a different use case.
I learned a lot about relationship management working with this consultant, and managing frustration, but I also took the time to learn about the ERP that we were moving to, learn about the issues that it was supposed to solve and I took the time to learn what the employees that would be utilizing this piece of software hoped/needed/wanted to gain from it.
I also learned that a major part of the hold up was that no one knew how we were going to get out of our antiquated ERP system. We could have the best ERP in the world, and it was irrelevant if we couldnt get our information into it. Having Database administration experience I was able to figure out how to run some queries to the database directly to export out the data we needed.
I am not sure how this would have ended up if I had not taken the lead on it, but I do know that we were being told it would be another year. After I took over we went live on the new system, with all the integrations into the ERP, eCommerce and warehouse management software 3 months later.
