It's time for consultants to band together and create a bill of rights for contracts

Capital cities naturally tend to have large groupings of computer systems consultants.Having spent about a third of my career as a technology management consultant, and having done so in Ottawa, Washington and Sacramento, my perspective may differ a bit from that of many of those who work only in Ottawa. In my view, beginning in the mid-1990s, and more so since the tech crash of 2000-2001, there has been a tendency for the federal government to take advantage of many people in the consulting community. Sometimes this rises to the level of outright abuse. Those of us who have good contacts (or own businesses) in other markets are somewhat better insulated from these malevolent practices, since we can tell the offenders to take a hike, but these practices ultimately hurt everyone, even those who work for large brand-name companies. They also hurt the unit retaining the consultant. So, maybe the larger firms, the smaller ones and the many independents ought to band together and demand something tantamount to a Technology Consultants Charter of Rights. I propose it contain the following:

Transparency of Requirements: First and foremost, develop clear and true requirements. Don't issue RFIs or RFPs that are either dubious or just a way to make the originator look busy. Thousands of hours of professional time are wasted every year responding to RFPs that are either entirely fictional or are basically customized for one intended winner. This is particularly hard on the smaller firms and individuals who can ill-afford to be flat-out wasting their time in this way. The cure for this is to make the sponsor run an RFI to qualify bidders - even for mid-sized jobs such as maybe $100,000 and then pay each of the qualified bidders time and materials for writing their proposals. This would also tend to curb unnecessarily long-winded RFPs. Also, much more honesty is required as to the true term, and true renewal prospects, of contracts. Too many consultants have granted a very concessionary per-diem or hourly rate based on the promise that this was a nine-month contract only to learn (later) that just a three-month Phase 1 was actually funded and that all further funding is under indefinite review. This is nothing short of bait-and-switch, a practice that in the private sector can land a merchant in jail. Fixing this behaviour is easy: make the offending contract authority repay the difference between the consultant's normal rate and the discount rate - for the days actually worked - when the remainder of the promised project fails to materialize.

Fair Contracting: The entire Government of Canada contracting system has become an unfathomable mess, even to full-time marketers of consultants. True too, some consultants have to beg and scrimp for small one-month renewals - one after the other - while other firms are awarded $500,000 contracts, sometimes as many as 18 in a row. Whether it is a development project or the creation and implementation of a strategic plan, there are often good reasons for keeping the same consultant or team of consultants together for an extended assignment. Sometimes this requires line managers and contracting staffs to develop the ingenuity of a Philadelphia lawyer to make it happen. Raise the limit for directed contracts to a more practical $100,000 to 250,000 across the board and permit renewals under clearly specified conditions. Also, over the past couple of years, many small and medium-sized firms spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to obtain formal supply agreements (essentially standing offers) only to discover that no call-ups would be done under them or that, as PWGSC announced recently to a roar of disapproval, the whole system may now be scrapped and replaced by something else. Encourage unsolicited proposals and reward them with directed contracts, rather than convoluted contracting processes. We have also seen cases of GoC departmental contracting units being so incompetent that they repeatedly lose invoices tendered to them. One recently even amended the wrong contract when they were supposed to be setting up a new one.

Maybe we need to evolve to a true electronic marketplace - beyond what we have now - which does not force the smaller firms to always subcontract. Subcontracting is never a deal between equals and there are manifold cases of prime contractors mistreating, and sometimes even not paying, subcontractors. I have friends who have come close to losing their houses because of this type of behaviour, while the bureaucrats for whom the work was done stood idly by.

Finally, don't expect consultants to work for free or to start working before the contract is actually in place; after all, you wouldn't expect a dealer to deliver your new car before you paid for it.

Stop Playing Human Resources: Selecting individual consultants, or teams of them, to do specific projects is not the same thing as hiring employees. It seems to have never occurred to some GoC departments and agencies (who run their contracting divisions just like HR shops) that one of the reasons many independent consultants and groups of consultants who work in small firms are consultants in the first place is that they don't want to be employees and don't like the HR process - and they particularly don't like being called "resources."

It is degrading and insulting. When I think of resources, I think of coal, ice, oil, water and so on - not people. True too, the evaluation matrices found in many RFPs over the last year or two are clearly more preoccupied with counting the months of service doing X, Y or Z - and about counting keywords - than letting the person tell in their own words why they believe they are best qualified to do the project.

Playing "silly matrix" has almost become more important than being competent or having a good work history. Finally, it is my firm belief that for most of this 21st century it will be the jobs, joblets, projects and tasks which are treated as objects, not the people.

Twenty years from now, historians will look back and marvel at the fact that people permitted themselves to be referred to as resources.

HumaneWorking Conditions: Don't ask consultants to work in tiny half-cubicles unfit even for a summer student. Take full advantage of their own offices and their conversance with the home workplace so that they can be onsite when needed (for meetings).

Free them to work wherever it makes the most sense. If you need someone to be full-time at the office then give them accommodations commensurate with their rank, role and responsibilities.

That means at least a large comfortable cubicle and in some cases a closed office. When working at Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and other clients I have usually been given a closed office, something that happens to very few consultants within the federal government. The usual excuse is there isn't enough space.

If you don't have enough space, then either don't hire consultants or else let them work at their own office or home more of the time.

Would you bring a plumber into your home and not give him proper access to the pipes and a well-lit workspace?

Tools: Give them the tools to do the job. Most will come equipped with a laptop and garden-variety productivity tools, but if you want something more, then plan to provide them the licences, and recover them at the end of the contract. Or provide zero-client access to an application server. Don't expect them to buy weird software packages, which they may never use again, out of their earnings.

Authority and Support: Provide the authority and support needed to accomplish the mission. It is futile to hold consultant project managers accountable when they are not given the authority, and support, in the first place. I know of a case where a consultant was asked to manage a major system implementation - in a business-critical area - where the recipient unit was more interested in playing petty politics with the project than collaborating. Lack of full and sufficient support from the project's executive owner greatly harmed the ultimate outcome and made everyone unhappy. There have also been manifold cases of forming entire project teams to develop an application, only to discover that there is no place for them to work, or that the tools they need have yet to be acquired, or that some major stakeholder is still trying to block or even kill the entire project.

Fair and Prompt Pay: Too many firms in Ottawa have gone out of business because contracting staffs who get regular bi-weekly pay cheques have no concept of what it means to be out-running your line of credit because the government is agonizingly slow to pay.

Also, those who are most keen to drive consultant rates downward tend to forget that most consultants do not work 100 per cent of the time so their income has to cover both busy and idle times.