Russ Miles: Software Consultants Care Too (well, great ones do)

By Caitrin McCullough

Here's the latest from Head First Software Development author Russ Miles. Enjoy!

Yesterday I talked about people being the 'special sauce' of really great software development, and today I thought I'd take things a bit further and closer to home for me, into the realm of 'consultants'. As a consultant myself I really love working alongside great (and even not so great) development teams and I take a huge amount of satisfaction in delivering what a client needs. However consultants tend to have a bit of a bad name, and it is that myth I wanted to talk about here.

Here are some common myths about consultants that I've met over the years:

1) Consultants only care about the money
2) Consultants want to get in and out without doing tons of work
3) Consultants need to be beaten to make sure they help you deliver
4) Consultants just want to make themselves invaluable, and the project as long as possible, so they can make as much money as they can

Ok, so some (or even all) of these may actually be true in some cases, but not in the majority of cases and certainly not in the cases where a consultant is truly great at what they do. Now, it's true that often a consultants performance is not measured specifically on an artifact such as a 'software deliverable', and often consultants really are taken on just to 'get a specific job done', but when you get the agreed result as a given, but then great consultants try to take things to the next level for their clients. Why do they do this, because they really do care.

For example, I was recently working alongside a team out in South Africa and the specification for my work was to deliver some front-end mobile content. Simple enough, and if I'd just done that then at the end of the day I could have said to myself, "I've done my job". But being as good a consultant as possible, I brought the lessons and practices from Head First Software Development to bear on what I was doing, and actually helped put in place a collection of great practices that would really help the team deliver. That's wasn't in the job description as such, but because I cared about how the team worked and delivered I felt it was right to offer as much input as I could.

That's the real difference. A good consultant does the job, a great one delivers above and beyond.

Software development to a good consultant is a craft, and a quality one at that. One we actually take pride in, and that pride has nothing to do with the paycheck, honestly. A good consultant knows what it takes to make your team deliver what's needed and be successful, but a great one really cares that you meet your goals and does everything they can to help you out, even if their work goes 'off spec' at times.

So I guess I'm holding my hands up, like a slightly embarrassed but righteous member of Consultants (Not so)Anonymous, to say this:

"I care about what my clients deliver, I care about what I deliver, and I do everything I can to be very proud of both"

There, I've said it, and I won't be alone either. So next time you're working alongside a consultant remember that they will honestly care as much as you that you and your team deliver. And if you're ever in the position where you are the consultant, remember to avoid the 4 trappings mentioned at the beginning of this post and, above all, care about making the teams you work with successful.

 

 

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