Thanks for reading, my name is Sergio Flores and I’m the Lead Consultant at SAFT.Industries, where I help entrepreneurs and business managers to execute their vision by enabling the technology to support it.

Today I’d like to talk to you about the considerations that you need to keep in mind when hiring a Consultant to take care of a project for you. I imagine that you already know you have a problem that could be solved with software, maybe a process on your organization that requires some automation or data control, or maybe it’s a new business idea that you have in mind for a SAAS product. Either way, you are now considering if engaging the services of a Consultant is right for you and how could you go about it. Well, read on!

For starters, there are 3 main benefits to engaging the services of a Consultant:

1. Consultants are experts. Some focus on a very narrow field, and some have a wider field of activity, but what we all have in common is that just by doing our normal work, we become battle tested, since we’re used to figuring out how to deliver results, over and over again.

2. Consultants are affordable in the long run. That is compared to the alternative, which is hiring unqualified people, thus wasting time and money.

3. Consultants are independent professionals; meaning, that we are engaged by our clients to design and execute solutions to problems, NOT to become employees to be given exact, specific instructions on what to do.

Thefore, from the above strengths of Consultants, you can naturally arrive at the situation when you should hire one:

Hire a Consultant when you need an expert to independently solve a problem for you.

So, do you have a problem? Do you need an expert to solve it? And, do you need this problem solved in an independent way? A consultant is the way to go.

On the contrary, the situation in which you would NOT want to hire a consultant would be:

1. When your problem does not require expert knowledge on a particular area.

2. When you need someone to work for you as an employee, for whatever reason.

But, let’s assume that you’ve decided to hire a Consultant. Now, how would you go about the task of choosing one and executing your project? Let’s break it down into steps:

0. Commit to your project. For your project to succeed, you’ll need to budget for it enough time and money, as per your Consultant guidance, but you’ll also need to secure buy-in from all the relevant people in your organization, preferably including as well the actual users of the software you have in mind.

1. Consider the area of expertise that you need. For example, we at SAFT.Industries are focused on Google Cloud, Digital Assistants, Blockchain, Data Engineering and Web development for B2B or internal tools. That means, we wouldn’t take projects that deviated too much from these areas, but you can always ask if you don’t know.

2. When choosing a Consultant, take into account his or her personality and how does it fit with your project and organization. Speaking for myself, I work best with future oriented organizations, where a little risk is ok, and with relatively few rules, and thus what matters is solving the problem at hand within a reasonable time and budget; but other consultants prefer to work in highly regulated industries, and are used to deal with a large amount of procedure and compliance requirements.

3. Engage in an exploratory talk. This is critical. The initial discussion purpose is to clarify the project’s expectations, risks, estimated costs, the project’s process, payments, and all other questions that could come up before actually moving forward with it. I also use this discussion to figure out if there are features that the client has in mind that are not technically feasible or that would be too expensive for the available budget.

4. Clarity of plans. By this I mean, that before commencing the actual work of producing the software in question, the plan for the project must be as clear and detailed as possible given the project scope. Larger projects actually need a paid planning stage, to address their needs.

5. Quality takes time and money. I approach my work with carefulness and dedication, with the aim of producing software that is well designed, well crafted and that serves the purpose for which it was conceived. For this reason, I don’t do rushed projects and I always prepare my financial proposals with the highest quality in mind.

6. Remain engaged throughout the process. Building software is a bit like hiring an architect to build you a house; in addition to getting a plan based on your needs, you will also be best served by remaining available during all phases of the project, to make sure everything is going in the right direction and that you’ll be satisfied with the end result.

7. Finally, once your project is live, it’s advisable to implement metrics and analytics on it, to gather feedback on its performance, on whatever axis is important, be that technical, operational, in user satisfaction or engagement, or other relevant factor. The important thing is to measure, in order to have data on which to base future improvements.

Well, I think that’s a good primer on the topic. One final consideration that I’d like to mention, is that you should be in alignment with your Consultant in terms of values, work approach, and overall way of operating a business; this is because, ultimately, is a very involved relationship, so you can’t really work with people with whom you are not aligned. Thus for me, is very important to have a good relationship with all my clients.

Are you interested in learning more about this process or explore how could it be applied to your particular needs? Please send us a message using the form below, for a no-commitment, exploratory talk about your problem.