David F. Schaack, PhD. : Why Use a Consultant?

People often call on consultants when they need specific expertise that isn't available on staff, when a whole project needs to be outsourced, or when there is simply too much work for the available staff to handle. While these are good reasons, they are not the only ones, and may not even be the most important.

More strategically, some people profit by using consultants to identify the key issues that must be addressed in a project or a decision, to help get a project organized and rolling, to add technical “meat” to a team, to bring additional creativity to a problem-solving process, and to bring an additional sense of perspective to a decision-making process. Consultants are usually highly experienced; they have seen many failures as well as successes. They realize that the latest technology is not always the answer, and they know that problems do not always have a technical solution.

Proactive managers employ consultants in part to stimulate their employees, and/or to energize a flagging project.

Large engineering projects are difficult. Many decisions have to be made early in a large project. As people work intensely on the program and as the program goes through its many changes, the original reasons for the early decisions tend to be forgotten, and these decisions tend to be treated as inviolable axioms of the project. The design of the product or system sometimes thereby drifts into a severe state of suboptimization. One of the things that a consultant can do is to take a fresh and unbiased look at the project's current state and examine whether revisiting some early decisions may be the answer to moving the project forward.

An advantage, often unrecognized, to using consultants that a consultant is always there. When employees leave, and they do leave, they take their knowledge of the company's designs and history with them. A consultant, if employed over a period of years, can be the repository of more historical knowledge than exists within the client organization itself.