10 warning signs of bad projects

Warning signs of a bad consulting company:

Having worked for a large (8,000 US employee) IT/Business Consulting firm for 8 years and been involved with several large-scale projects from start to 'finish,' I can give companies several warning signs that they're being rooked. The assumed scenario is for a 18 month to 3-4 year project needing approximately 30 consultants.

1) The consultant company puts names of people in the contract. While having the resume of the consultants working for you may seem like a great idea, the consulting company has no real control over that employee should they decide to leave. Insist on the requirements (experience/education) of roles and then have the consulting company show how their employee meets those requirements. If he or she leaves, the company must replace them with someone equally qualified.

2) The company promises the personal attention of a VP (also named) to act as an 'engagement manager.' After many meetings in the beginning, this individual will spend as little time as possible dealing with you or your project and yet bill you for as much time as possible. You really have no way to check. I've seen VPs get really angry when they have to 'waste time doing stupid project work.'

3) They offer a combination fixed-price/time-and-materials contract. Without fail, the worked required in the fixed-price portion of the contract will not be completed (assuming it ever could be). The contract writers know this and will plan to make up the work in the time-and-materials portion, at your expense.

4) The project requires, say, 5,000 man-hours by your estimate and the contract bids 3,500. Despite the somewhat obvious sign of desperation, companies still bite at this. While there is something to be said for the talant and efficiency of the would-be contractors, it is also said that if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't.

5) The promise of an 'all expert' staff. 'All of the people working on this have extensive experience...' Maybe half of them will. The rest will be college graduates who you're paying to train. Insist on the resumes of EVERYONE.

6) The promise of customizing an off-the-shelf, pre-existing product. Even if the consulting company created the pre-existing product, chances are that the team of consultants assigned to your project have little or no direct experience with it. The customization will often exceed the size of the original software package (in terms of raw lines of code).

7) The analysis team is comprised almost exclusively of business analysts and business process experts. Seems like a good idea. However with no technical experts on-hand to keep their promises grounded, you will be given many wonderful promises of features and abilities that the programmers will later declare impossible within the current technological constraints. "Of course you'll be able to interact with your COBOL-mainframe system from a browser. And it will be perfectly secure too!"

- Caveat emptor -