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Ask Slashdot: How Do You To Tell Your Client That His "Expert" Is an Idiot?
Esther Schindler writes "It's a danger for any consultant, and for most inter-departmental internal project staff: To get the work done, you need to work with someone else who supplies expertise you lack. But when the 'expert' turns out to be the wrong person how do you tell the client (or boss) that you just can't work with that individual?"
Many years back a CEO of a subdivision of a company wanted to know why his email service was disrupted. I told them that it was because their idiot webmaster took control of their DNS and did not copy the MX record. The webmaster defended himself claiming that a document was not in place explaining how to handle the client's DNS. This went back and forth a bit between the three of us, and ended with me calling the two of them incompetent and irresponsible. I never spoke to the webmaster or the client CEO for better or worse.
A few years later, the CEO of the parent company called wanting to know why his network was suffering intermittent downtime and demanded it be fixed immediately. I explained that his outage was caused by antiquated equipment that could not do debugging, and there was a proposal already on his desk for replacement gear. He was in a huff, but he knew I didn't mince words or advice, and that quote was signed in minutes.
While you can't always directly point to a net gain after a net loss, your experience and attitude will help define how other perceive you. You can go in quite politely, or you can be very blunt. I have been both depending on the situation.
Either way, if you can't call out losers, you'll wind up being one.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
At my last job, we brought in consultants to implement a "workflow" solution for tracking trading agreements. The system was to leverage our internal systems for reference data that would be tracked in a third party document storage platform. The primary user of the system was our internal legal team. The consultants refused to design or implement the system with real-time connectivity because of an uptime requirement. They claimed a "5 9s requirement". They insisted on dumping, en mass, data from our primary store into their system. I knew straight off it was a joke, because they were pulling the data from a core trading system that was required to be available for all but 2 hours over the weekend (even then, we only had 15 minute outages maybe once every 6 months for deployments). And, having recently retired a process that synched data between two systems (migration from a legacy to new system), in real time, I had all sorts of horror stories and cautionary tales to share. It all fell on deaf ears. I took concerns to my management and said I would not implement their solution and outlined why. Their response was to pull me from the project and put in a yes-man that would do whatever he was told.
You're facing a problem here:
Your boss hired this person, most likely for a lot of money. He has to justify that expense. Admitting now that he fell for a snakeoil peddler is not something that will further his career.
Right, and for that reason asking your boss to choose between yourself and golden boy (aka, 'the expert') is a loosing proposition. If you feel you absolutely can't work with the new guy under any circumstances find a new job and then quit your current one. Be polite about it and don't tell them it's because of the expert if you can at all avoid it, just give them some blurb about 'personal reasons' or that you feel 'your career is stalling but that you have grown as a professional at this company... blah blah blah....' management loves that sort of verbal diarrhoea. Leave your boss to fall on his face with the new guy or succeed (it is after all possible that you are wrong). One thing is for sure, nobody will derive any advantage from an acrimonious dissolution of your employment relationship, least of all you. Another poster here suggested being blunt about your gripe. I have to disagree since I have always thought that making an angry speech where you go into details about how you feel other employees or management are a bunch of morons when you quit your job is a bloody stupid idea since I am generally not in favour of burning bridges. Of course other people's experiences with bridge burning may be more positive than mine.
My best advice for anyone in this situation is to document everything .
I spent a few years working customer service handling orders for manufacturing company. One particularly customers was a consistent problem. This company believed one of their personnel shat gold bricks, but I realized right off that they were incompetent and used lies & intimidation to cover this up.
This person would routinely fax their orders at the end of the day (right before they would leave) without confirming that they actually sent me the files necessary to start their order, and that their orders were almost always "rush" orders with very very short turn around times. Another thing this person would do, would be to call me up, tell me they had an order and ask me what the latest day they would need to receive the order by a specific date and time. I would tell them, then they would wait well past this final submittable date, submit their order and then claim that I had promised to turn around the product by that time. Over the years, the turn around time necessary to complete their orders shrunk to impossible expectations and their customer began getting upset as my customer started blaming me personally for the delays.
The irritating part, is that whenever I some how failed to live up to this person's errors (i.e., I was unable to cover for them), they would call up my boss and complain about me. My boss only believed half their bullshit, but it was still enough to impact my career.
Unfortunately for them, one of their customers wasn't an idiot, and had remembered me when he came along to our plant for a facility inspection prior to us beginning production of their product. This customer set up a meeting between our companies and asked me point blank when I received the purchase order, when I received the files and when I delivered the product. Thankfully, I had records of the time and date of every purchase order that company had ever sent, along with records of the time and date of receipt of every file to begin production, as well as the delivery date of the product to their warehouse.
It turned out that the end customer was sending the purchase orders to our problem person up to three weeks before the problem person would send me the PO and files. The problem person would sit on the file for weeks before submitting it to their production and farming out our part to us. The problem person ended up losing their company around $2million in sales yearly when they lost their client.
We ended up being directly contracted by the end customer to continue manufacturing our part of their product.