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Hiring a consultant is sometimes necessary, at other times unavoidable. Hiring is a qualitative effort, thus, you’ll try to hire a consultant you can trust. Sometimes you have no choice but to work with a stakeholder’s pet consultant. Regardless of how you get into the relationship, you need to lay down the criteria for success up front. Here are some suggestions:

• You have a business critical problem, and the consultant helps you define or refine, and sharpen the problem definition. Now you can do something about the problem.
• You are short of expertise and need talent temporarily. This is more staff augmentation, not a real consulting project. “Consulting” sounds better, so go with that.
• The consultant tells you something you don’t know. These include best practices to gain a competitive advantages, lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid, and time/money saving tips (these are the “dots”). This also includes the connections you missed (between dots).
• The consultant helps you get organized. Becoming streamlined is underrated, being disorganized hides many inefficiencies.
• You want to try out an idea, but don’t want to devote full time resources to it.

While consultants need to be independent, they need to ensure someone will receive their advice. If no one takes ownership, the consultant’s work will be wasted. The proposals made should be in line with the client’s operations and thus should be made with change management in mind. Any proposals that intend to make the consultant look good or delivered with “you need to do this” will be immediately dismissed. Thus consultants are well advised to make sure there is an internal customer or sponsor for their ideas before they propose one.