How to pick IT consultants - a checklist
Ralf Haller
June 15th, 2008
I just read another great blog post from Bob Cringely, this one on how to pick IT consultants. In case you have not heard of Bob (Robert X. Cringely to be precise) he’s been an IT writer for now “30 years in and around the PC business”. Looks like he has worked in other areas too, such as the oil industry, at least one other great blog post from Bob mentions that he attended OPEC meetings. Bob writes pretty long and exhaustive blog posts so you need to put a little time aside for reading his blogs, but it is worth I can tell you! He also does not take himself too seriously it seems - at least that’s how I read his own short bio “Sex symbol, airplane enthusiast and intrepid adventurer Robert X. Cringely - the nerdiest of them all?”.
From his IT consultant post this check list here could come handy when you select IT consultants for a project:
“Now to the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. When you hear these lines spoken you have two alternatives: 1) fire the consultant on the spot, and; 2) bring your smartest and most crotchety nerds into the room and make the consultant explain his or her statement to their satisfaction then back it up with some performance guarantee and penalty clause.
1 ) “This can only be accomplished through a large custom development project.”
2 ) “Of course your data is safe.”
3 ) “We’ll need a day or two for optimization and debugging.”
4 ) “Yes, we’ve done this before. There are several companies using this product (or technology). They really like it.”
5 ) “Server consolidation and virtualization will save you money.”
6 ) “Storage consolidation and virtualization will save you money.”
7 ) “The upgrade (or change) will be seamless and will not affect production.”
8 ) “The upgrade (or change) will be transparent to users.”
9 ) “Yes, we tested this thoroughly before installing it.”
10 ) “If you install Tivoli it will solve all your support problems.” “