Consultancy skills for the 21st Century

NCC Members have free access to this Guideline on the Principia website.

Over the years, the NCC has received many comments about the use of IT Consultants; a recurring theme relates to how to select the right consultant for an assignment. To provide some much needed guidance, NCC commissioned the Institute of IT Training to consider the issues and put forward an approach that would resolve it. Alan Bellinger - a director of the Institute and a well respected editorial consultant on skills issues - responds.

Consultants; don't you just love to hate them! Well no, not really, just the few that give consultants the reputation that they, like car salesmen, don't deserve!

The ability to buy in expert, specialist advice is a very real business benefit in this fast change global business we now all operate in; to become a truly agile enterprise, flexibility within the workforce is critical. Either, there are specialist skills to which you need infrequent access, there maybe a short term skills need to be resourced, or a requirement for a skillset that you don't want to resource internally. So, rest assured, consultants will play an even bigger role in the 'business as normal' syndrome for the foreseeable future.