The Consultant's Conundrum: Balancing Advice and Execution

I'm starting to conclude that a consultant shouldn't be an execution partner.

I have, for most of my career been a consultant, also delivering the solutions of the consulting outcomes. By definition, this approach of coupling the both would inject the paradox of what we popularly call "conflict of interest!"

Let me explain that with an example. Let's say, a pre-owned car dealer wanted to mask the license plates of the cars in the photos their agents clicked before listing them on their website. As an analytics consultant, I would look at this as a computer vision problem and would have suggested training / deploying a pre trained model that can do the masking of license plates. On top of this, I would have advised developing an interface that allows the website folks to upload the images which runs these models as a preprocessing step before listing them on their website.

Then I saw this last week:

If the stark contrast wasn't clearly evident, let me articulate: I was suggesting probably a $50,000 solution for a $10 problem.

Yes, this is not sophisticated. Yes, this is less elegant.

But does it do the job? And should the client be given this option to decide for themselves? are the two important questions to answer.

This brings me to the thought that I started this post with. Should consultant be an execution partner and hence by definition be blindsided with the solutions that fall outside the realm of their expertise? A consultant that delivers analytics projects wouldn't think of indigenous solutions like above. Even if they do, they'd really try to shut their mouths for the fear of losing incremental revenue.

Clear separation between consulting and execution leads to less biased outcomes.

Henceforth, I only have two recommendations:

1. Prefer having consultants inside the org who have better context of the problem. If you need an outsider perspective, decouple the consulting and execution projects for quality outcomes.

2. This probably is an oversimplification but customer satisfaction should be the ONLY metric a consultant should be measured on. Other performance measures can distract from delivering the outcome the client truly desires.