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	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Flame the author     In this article Introduction What do You Need? Specialists Only? Executive Summary Going Going.Not Gone Meet the Consultants: Comparison of Company Specs

At some point, it's time to say good-bye to your consultant--preferably when your project ends. But consultants live for the next engagement, and finding more to fix for the current client is easier than setting up at a brand-new gig. If you're not careful, your expert may sign you up for more than you intended. "The way consultants stick around for months after they're supposed to be done--it's almost like a virus," says Craig Duncan, a telecom manager for a large communications provider.

How do you prevent consultants from overstaying their welcome--most notably through tactics in which they set themselves up to provide the maintenance on your new system?

Start before the engagement begins, by clearly scoping out the project. Define where the consultancy ends and maintenance begins. "If someone comes in and creates something I can't maintain, they've set themselves up for an outsourcing or longer-term relationship beyond the scope of our consulting relationship," Duncan says. If this is what you want, great, but it's prudent to arrange the outsourcing deal separately. Typically, companies that do both outsourcing and consulting have different business units to handle each.

Furthermore, Duncan notes, you need to understand the pricing structure with respect to additional work, and you need to comprehend the internal and external influences that will drive any post-engagement maintenance.

Most system integration projects have ongoing maintenance concerns, so Duncan advises doing an internal skills analysis before embarking upon such projects; that way, you'll get a sense of the feasibility or desirability of maintaining the project in-house. (See "Decision Dissection").

And if it's "after the fact"? Don't hesitate to renegotiate a project that has clearly gone outside the original scope of the work--or pull the plug and start over. Duncan has seen projects with requirements that changed over the build cycle to the point where the system was no longer sufficiently flexible to meet the new requirements. In one project, Duncan recalls, the system's internal workings were incomprehensible to the client's staff, and the consultant wound up doing the maintenance. In the end, he says, "it was significantly cheaper to rebuild the system and maintain it internally than to keep paying consultant prices for maintenance."

Of course, good consultants will be just as interested as you are in keeping a project's scope tight, as upcoming engagements will provide an incentive for them to finish your project on schedule.

And while "the end of game should mean you're done," says Siemens' Paul Rightmeyer, "my assignment should also be to identify other areas of potential improvement. I would want that from my partner." He has a good point: If additional cost savings and/or process improvements are within reach, a good consultant will identify some strategies. At that point, you can decide whether to re-engage the consultant's services. Thinking of this stage as separate from your original project can help you keep the project's scope from ballooning uncontrollably.