long long ago at a careers fair far far away
I sold* my soul away from engineering, away from good honest computer technocracy and became, well I’ll be blunt, a management consultant.

And having enthusiastically joined the dark side I’ve successfully pillaged my way across various projects, clients and companies over the intervening years in a ruthless pursuit of cold hard cash. To be honest it’s been more fun that a barrel full of greased monkeys and a family sized tub of methamphetamine, spurn those who seek to advise you away from such a career, it’s well paid, you get to travel business class a lot and female management consultants are all incredibly dirty in bed.

Anyhoo, there are only a few, self evident, dirty tricks to this trade.
1 Never ever ever say no**. e.g.
Q: Can you fly the F-15e?
A: Well as you can see I have years of experience with paper aeroplanes and cunningly shaped party balloons and the parallels are clear.
2 Always appear to be only slightly smarter than the customer, even if they are as dumb as a box of rocks and dribble. This makes it much easier to take all the money out of the building.
3 The words “intelligent client organisation” guarantee the exact opposite, so change 50% more.
4 The words “PRINCE2” used anywhere in a project spec doom the whole enterprise, charge 75% more.
5 Be like the Borg, assimilate everything and everyone into your way of thinking, or if possible your organisation and then start charging for managing your own teams.
6 There is always a handy client-side scapegoat, your first task is to identify that person.
7 Never get knowingly caught delivering anything, that’s the job of the scapegoat in #6.
8 A well written strategy is worth approximately 1000 times per word the effort in a well written procedure. Charge appropriately.
9 Business change is easy if you actually ask the end users or mid level business managers what they need. Ruthlessly expunge anyone found doing this.

Of course few of these are ever expressed in such clear language but the basics are there.
Enjoy.

* and believe me I got the better side of that deal I can tell you.
** unless money is involved, feel free to say no to requests for free stuff, but do it nicely.

Some of the above may not be true, remember #11 is always lie, always.
( edz314 smelled the glove on, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 16:15, Reply)