I haven’t worked as a consultant yet, but We have had consultants working for us in my company. We had consultants who worked on site and remote as well.
We generally choose consultants if we want to get some thing done in a short period of time, one time activity.
I can throw in two examples.
One where we wanted to setup and train our team in Android Open Source Project for our custom built devices. We hired a consultant who has done Google Developer Expert Certification and who teach a popular course in Pluralsight. With that credibility we initially had our rough patches with them for couple of weeks where we were complained about the build environment, practices etc., However once we got past that obstacle, the team really jelled and worked closely with him and get the project done. All we wanted was to finish the initial build setup and train us in customizing. He got it done in about 3-4 months. We have had no troubles since then. One thing I should mention is that his hourly rate was outrageous and literally close to 2-3 full time developers hourly salary.
The other example is where we hired an iOS developer as consultant for re-designing our existing app with in 4-6 months duration. He was working remotely, and comes to on-site twice a month. The first one month, we got daily commit notifications, weekly reports of the progress. And then onwards it started decreasing and we broke the contract in the third month as we didn’t receive any updates and we couldn’t reach him at all. He came back after 6 months but my company wasn’t interested in hiring him again.
Lessons that we learnt,
Validate the credentials of the consultant before hiring,
Some times it’s worth the money investing, especially when it’s a one time task and require different skill set than the current team’s skill set.
Be cautious and establish a trust relationship with consultants working remotely.
P.S: Right now we have two consultants working for us in a legacy project. One on-site person and another person working remotely (Both has great work ethic and we love working with them).
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I haven’t worked as a consultant yet, but We have had consultants working for us in my company. We had consultants who worked on site and remote as well.
We generally choose consultants if we want to get some thing done in a short period of time, one time activity.
I can throw in two examples.
One where we wanted to setup and train our team in Android Open Source Project for our custom built devices. We hired a consultant who has done Google Developer Expert Certification and who teach a popular course in Pluralsight. With that credibility we initially had our rough patches with them for couple of weeks where we were complained about the build environment, practices etc., However once we got past that obstacle, the team really jelled and worked closely with him and get the project done. All we wanted was to finish the initial build setup and train us in customizing. He got it done in about 3-4 months. We have had no troubles since then. One thing I should mention is that his hourly rate was outrageous and literally close to 2-3 full time developers hourly salary.
The other example is where we hired an iOS developer as consultant for re-designing our existing app with in 4-6 months duration. He was working remotely, and comes to on-site twice a month. The first one month, we got daily commit notifications, weekly reports of the progress. And then onwards it started decreasing and we broke the contract in the third month as we didn’t receive any updates and we couldn’t reach him at all. He came back after 6 months but my company wasn’t interested in hiring him again.
Lessons that we learnt,
P.S: Right now we have two consultants working for us in a legacy project. One on-site person and another person working remotely (Both has great work ethic and we love working with them).