In the worse two years an a half of my life working for one of the big consulting firms, here is what was considered a typical scenario:
1. Our firm goes in a project, armed with 10 project directors, 3 senior project directors, 5 project managers, 8 business analysts, 4 architects, and 2 programmers.
2. At a rate of many thousands of dollars an hour, the team begins to start gathering information from the customer.
3. This goes on for weeks or months. The customer has no sense that anything is happening, because precisely *not*a*whole*lot* is happening other than a lot of paper pushing and superficial analysis
4. Customer freaks out at the expenses, thinking that if the it's *that* expensive to even get the project rolling, the cost will be astronomical to actually do the implementation, so customer terminates the project.
5. Consulting firm goes away scott free with plenty of money in their pockets.
6. Consulting firm repeats step 1 through 5 with other customers and rarely gets any implementation done (which explains why there are 50 chiefs and only 2 indians).
In 2 years and a half of consulting, my total implementation time (including design), was 6 months.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Our firm goes in a project, armed with 10 project directors, 3 senior project directors, 5 project managers, 8 business analysts, 4 architects, and 2 programmers.
2. At a rate of many thousands of dollars an hour, the team begins to start gathering information from the customer.
3. This goes on for weeks or months. The customer has no sense that anything is happening, because precisely *not*a*whole*lot* is happening other than a lot of paper pushing and superficial analysis
4. Customer freaks out at the expenses, thinking that if the it's *that* expensive to even get the project rolling, the cost will be astronomical to actually do the implementation, so customer terminates the project.
5. Consulting firm goes away scott free with plenty of money in their pockets.
6. Consulting firm repeats step 1 through 5 with other customers and rarely gets any implementation done (which explains why there are 50 chiefs and only 2 indians).
In 2 years and a half of consulting, my total implementation time (including design), was 6 months.
-- fryday