In today’s modern business environment, most organizations are familiar with the concept of a technology consultant. However, while many organizations tend to use the title consultant and contractor interchangeably, the job of a consultant differs significantly from that of a contractor.

A contractor is typically a specialist in a particular discipline or product, often serving as staff augmentation or hired to perform a specific task. Typically, the job that needs to be done is relatively simple, but the organization lacks the capacity or skill to perform it. Contrast this with consultants, who are typically multidisciplinary generalists who specialize in the creation of one or more types of comprehensive solutions that leverage technology to solve business problems. They may or may not specialize in a particular platform or technology, and they may be very experienced technicians. As such, consultants may perform technical or implementation duties in addition to their other duties. When all is said and done, the true value of a consultant is their ability to “see the forest for the trees”, which is to say that they can view the work as a whole and strategize without getting overly caught up in the details until necessary.

To illustrate, suppose our organization needs to deploy an email solution for our 1,000 employees. We would want to hire an Exchange contractor who would come in, evaluate our existing hardware and our requirement of supporting our current 1,000 employees, gather information about future growth requirements, and execute a deployment that would fulfill our need. If we need something more complicated, such as a complete solution for collaborating with both internal and external resources where email would be only a small part of the overall solution, we would hire a collaboration consultant. This consultant would design a comprehensive solution to meet that need by leveraging the necessary technologies and platforms, integrating with business processes (or working to define new ones), and intricately weaving the solution into the business.

Consultants provide other value as well, even beyond their capabilities for strategic vision, insight, and their substantial experience. Due to the complex and dynamic nature of the work they do, consultants intrinsically possess strong skills in analytical thinking and adaptability. These skills are especially important when gathering requirements for solutions that involve one or more organizational groups, where overlaps in requirements between groups will almost certainly exist. In these (very common) situations, any similar requirements must be cut down to their core drivers and needs for the purposes of full understanding, so that commonalities between them can be found. By doing so, a consultant can attempt to craft options that fulfill similar requirements from multiple groups, eliminate any duplication that may diminish productivity within the solution or user satisfaction.

Consultants are also skilled at “reading between the lines”, leveraging their experience to help clients fully consider their needs and how the platform or technology can address it. For example, clients will sometimes request functionality or express a specific requirement (e.g. a specific type of report) without fully understanding their reasons for the request. Furthermore, sometimes it is possible to meet a requirement multiple ways. By walking through the client’s existing or planned business process and understanding how they plan to use what they are requesting, consultants can gain the insight necessary to guide their clients to a solution that’s fully integrated into their business.

In essence, the difference is this: a technology contractor is brought in to execute specific technical work in a way that is heavily guided and is limited only to the specific work for which they were hired (e.g. installing Exchange, putting up drywall, or implementing a network switch), whereas a technology consultant is hired not just to perform work, but primarily to guide. The goal of a consultant is to learn the requirements, understand the underlying business needs, and use their experience to develop a comprehensive and strategic solution to fulfill those requirements by leveraging technology and integrating with the business.

Having established the difference between a consultant and a contractor, how is this relevant to our discussion of EPM? It’s time to examine what makes Project Server special…

Understanding the Value of EPM and EPM Consultants Series

• Part 1: Consultants Provide Strategic Vision
• Part 2: EPM is a Business Enabler
• Part 3: EPM Streamlines Your Activities

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