Beware of the ‘Milkman’ Consultants!
In my experience there are roughly three categories of technology consultants. At the top are highly skilled scientists and engineers who possess excellent technical and communications skills. They often have prior management experience and have become consultants because they want to work as an individual technical contributor rather than as a manager. These experts spend the time up front to understand your business goals and are able to give you what you really need which may be substantially different from what you thought you needed. The right consultant can add tremendous value to your project.
The bottom tier of consultants are the incompetents who cannot keep a job. They should be avoided like the swine flu.
Mid tier consultants are technically competent and can usually get the job done to your original requirements. However, some tend to milk a project by introducing or delaying the soution to problems that only they can easily fix. This causes the duration and fees of the consulting contract to miss both the time and budget goals. Once I hired a consultant for some “temporary” work and I changed jobs before the contract was complete . When I returned to the organization almost a decade later I was really surprised to see that this consultant was still milking the evolving original project. Watch out for the milkmen!