Spring Has Sprung...and so have some new testing challenges! The NVP Bug Report

Written by Philip Simon for Software Test and Performance Magazine - www.stpmag.com

Organizations might recognize the need for consultants but remain unsure about how to use them. In a traditional consulting arrangement, a firm might deploy a team of individuals full-time at a client site for
forty hours a week, typically four days at ten hours per day per consultant. Under milestone consulting, a client engages the firm to check in with them on a regular basis, ensuring that the project is meeting its goals. Then there's the hybrid consultant-offering equal parts project manager, techie, and application expert-with on-site visits every two weeks or so.

Consultancies typically prefer the traditional consulting arrangement, primarily because it maximizes billable time and revenue. Second, consultants on the ground can better steer clients in the right direction throughout the project, manage issues and ensure an overall smoother implementation. On the downside, traditional consulting tends to be the most expensive option for clients.

Also, many organizations face end-user availability issues. Client end-users are often overworked and too busy to spend time with consultants. Remember, endusers on implementation teams have day jobs while consultants are there to implement the new system exclusively.

Consultants on site are billing regardless of whether r not their skills are being used efficiently or not. In the rare event that a project is ahead of schedule, rare is the consulting company that attempts to move dates up or suggests that its consultants do not need to be on site for several weeks.

Among the most obvious of benefits of the milestone consulting approach is minimal cost. To the extent that the consultant's arrival is known well in advance, end-users can focus on their day jobs during the week knowing that they will devote certain days to the new system, coinciding with the arrival of the consultant. In theory, this can be more efficient.

But the milestone method should be used judiciously; it is rife with potential disadvantages. For example, there may be no one keeping an eye on the implementation on a daily basis, allowing goals and dates to fall by the wayside. Issues may not be broached in time to address them without impacting a go-live date. Also, the implementation's flow may suffer. Projects that constantly start and stop often lose momentum. Projects with more interruptions have a greater chance of failure and milestone-based approaches tend to have this limitation.

Given the cost of consultants, many clients might question the need to have a team of three or more highly paid hourly resources on staff for forty hours per week. As a general rule, the quality and number of required external resources varies indirectly with the quality and number of available and experienced internal end-users. In other words, an organization with extensive internal resources and expertise needs fewer external consultants. Organizations cannot expect to successfully implement major systems exclusively with either consultants or end-users. Almost always, a combination of each is required. Another consideration is end-user availability. Regular employees still have to do their day jobs in order for the organization to conduct business. For example, a payroll manager cannot set up, test, and document a new payroll system at the expense of paying current employees. If an organization wants to minimize the number of external consultants on an implementation, it must ensure that the end-users on its implementation team. It must ensure that the end-users on its implementation team are significantly devoted to, and have sufficient expertise in that system. A project's timeframe, complexity and scope are also critical factors. All else being equal, consultants called in to solve a discrete task with no particular due date may not need to show up for months at a time.

Assuming an organization's documentation is sufficient, a consulting firm may be able to perform the work required using the milestone approach. Conversely, consider a client with a bevy of complex issues, poor internal documentation, and a "drop-dead" date of two months to resolve an issue. It's very unlikely that the client will be able to use consultants in a limited capacity. Minimal consultant input and resources does not mean zero. On just about every new system implementation or upgrade, organizations must use external application experts, technical resources adept at installing the application and seasoned project managers who have dealt with many of the issues likely to face the client.

Many organizations lack the expertise that consultancies provide. As such, organizations benefit from having knowledgeable, on-site consultants who ensure that the project stays on course, issues are reported and resolved and that individual objectives are met. Before hiring external consultants, senior management should consider budget, the state of its internal documentation, end-user availability and the timeframe, scope, and complexity of the issue or project. A complex but poorly-documented issue that needs to be resolved yesterday cannot be accomplished under a milestone approach. At the other extreme, a simple but less urgent issue probably doesn't require a full-time team of consultants to solve it. Most real-world scenarios fall somewhere in between.