IT Consultancies Feeling The Pinch

It looks like Siemens has joined the growing number of large companies that are cancelling third-party consultants’ contracts

One of my main petrochemical clients had a drive to cut costs at the beginning of last year and ended up bringing in one of those “Grim Reaper” style management consultants for six months which caused a cacophony of carnage and resulted in half the staff losing their jobs, work being channelled to external teams and all budgets frozen.

Needless to say, our main area of project work had been targeted for termination and resulted in us desperately running around trying to generate some more business, especially as a large piece of work we were about to sign had suddenly been canned at the 11th hour.

The disenfranchised petrochemical team that remained were livid at seeing these management consultants break apart their work, ignore their concerns and make changes that seemed to be for the sake of changing things rather than having a deep understanding of the business.

The particular piece of work that we designed and were supporting at that time was moved offshore without the consultants or the recipient team even finding out who was currently supporting it.

There were plenty of demoralised staff accusing the cost saving fiasco as nothing more than a “being seen to be doing something” especially when you considered how much money could have been saved by not using this management consultancy in the first place. This sounds remarkably similar to the behaviour that our glorious Supreme Leader has been undertaking recently (courtesy of Burning our Money)

Like most SMEs, we tend to sense the whiff of a depression sooner than most and ”survival of the quickest” is a maxim worth remembering.