A consultant and a support contract solve different problems and are bought in different units. A consultant is hired to answer a question that has a date on it: should we move this to the cloud, what is wrong with our network, what should we spend next year, is this provider doing what it promised. A support contract is bought to make a recurring problem stop being yours. Firms in trouble often buy the second when what they needed was two days of the first.
The questions worth paying for I.T. consulting
Four recur. Whether to move a workload to the cloud and what it will actually cost once licences and egress are counted. Why a network is slow when everybody insists nothing changed. What next year's technology budget should be and what is inside it. And whether an incumbent provider is delivering what it was contracted to deliver, which is a question you cannot ask the incumbent. Each is bounded, each has an answer, and each is cheaper as a piece of work than as a year of guessing.
Independence is what IT consultant firms are actually paid for
The value collapses if the consultant sells the remedy. A provider offering a free assessment is offering a sales call, and there is nothing dishonest about that as long as everyone knows. Where the recommendation and the implementation come from the same place, the recommendation is worth what it costs, which is nothing. If you want an independent read on your current provider, buy it from somebody who cannot take over the contract.
What an IT consulting and services engagement should produce
A document you can hand to somebody else. Not a slide deck of findings, but the current state written down, the options with costs against them, a recommendation with the reasoning attached, and enough specification that a third party could implement it without re-doing the analysis. If the output cannot be handed to another supplier, you have bought a sales proposal.
Questions people ask about IT consultant
When should I hire an IT consultant instead of a provider?
When the problem has an end date. Cloud decisions, network faults, budget planning and reviewing an incumbent are all bounded questions. Ongoing patching, monitoring and a help desk are not, and belong in a contract.
Should I use my provider's free assessment, or an IT consultant agency?
Read it as a sales call, because it is one. It can still be useful. It is not an independent view of whether that provider is the right choice.
What should the engagement deliver?
A written current state, costed options, a recommendation with reasoning, and a specification another supplier could build from. Anything less is a proposal wearing a report's clothes.
Do consultants publish day rates for an IT consultant service?
Rarely, and none of the providers read for this record publishes one. Consulting is quoted per engagement in the same way managed contracts are quoted per assessment.
What does professional IT consulting deliver that a provider's assessment does not?
An answer that does not end in a proposal from the same firm. A free assessment is a sales document and often a good one, but a recommendation to buy nothing is not a result it can reach. Pay for the engagement when the question is whether to change provider, platform or approach at all.
Is technology strategy consulting the same as a vCIO retainer?
They overlap and they are bought differently. A retainer buys a standing advisory relationship, usually a fixed number of days a quarter; an engagement buys one question answered by a date. If the question is about the provider you already have, the retainer is the wrong instrument.