======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ==== ======= ======= ====== ====== ====== ===== ==== ====== ====== ===== ====
For those of you that don’t know, consulting is the career “smart” kids go into when they have no idea what they want to do in life. They aim to solve everyone else’s problems while pushing their own – both personal and professional – deep into the forgotten crevices of their psyche, only to emerge sometime in mid-life while staring down an empty bottle of Devil’s Potion. In a profession where we’re all on the verge of being admitted to an asylum, here’s a list of the dumbest things I’ve heard this week.
“The first thing we need to do, like the VERY FIRST THING we need to do, is figure out what we’re trying to do here.”
No shit, Sherlock. I don’t care if you’re PwC, KPMG, IBM, EY or NSFW, ninety percent of this career is trying to figure out what the fuck your doing at any point in time. No one actually knows and because of that, no one actually cares. You just wasted approximately 30 seconds telling us this, which according to your rate card just cost the client the equivalent of his morning Big Gulp.
“Hey, can you bang out a 2-3 year roadmap for me in like, 30 min?”
Hey, yeah sure! Let’s just throw a Modge Podge of all out best past proposals together and hope that shit sticks. Oh! Let me add some icons on those slides to spruce it up a little bit. Everyone loves icons. GOD I’m so creative.
“What’s a SME? Can you teach me how to be one?”
For those of you unfamiliar, a SME is a Subject Matter Expert. And no, I can’t teach you how to be one, because the only area where I’m a SME is thinking I am one – when I very clearly am not. I also am a SME in convincing others I’m a SME, which is quite a difficult skill to develop if I do say so myself. But be advised, the key to being a good SME is avoiding the real SMEs at all costs. Ain’t nobody got time for public exposure.
“That’s not a lie it’s a creative interpretation.”
Ah yes, lying, otherwise known as the Golden Rule of Consulting. I mean, there’s an actual show made about the profession called House of Lies. Here’s how the interaction usually goes:
Me: “Oh sure, Client! We’ll have that mobile app ready for you in time for your September release! Who cares if there are no requirements or use cases and our offshore teams literally don’t speak English?!”
From there, after countless false promises of status reports and cheap resources, we’ll start delivering with an agile methodology for a waterfall project, which essentially blows up the entire release and we call go up in flames. Rinse and fucking repeat.
“I’ll schedule some time to think about that in an hour and a half.”
I really just can’t..
Image via Showtime / YouTube
Respond
Consulting: If you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money in prolonging the problem.
Can confirm.
We also steal your watch and tell you what time it is
I sit near a group of Deloitte fucks at work. I’m convinced they just make power points. They just use buzzwords and then complain about their free hotels, Uber’s and food. Consolidate.
Let’s circle back to your point in a few hours.
I wish i could justify all my actions in real life with “that’s industry best practice.”
Oh and at PwC we don’t use SME anymore, we say SMS, subject matter specialist. Because the firm got sued last time we called ourselves experts.
Hello, fellow PwCer! Really? Because my team still calls them SMEs.
Huh maybe it was just my partner – never the matter he left for Accenture and took his best guys with him (not me ofc)
“Guys, guys, guys, everyone just chill out okay. We’re businessing here and in order to keep businessing we have to come up with more arbitrary 3 letter acronyms so no one here knows what the fuck we’re talking about. WE don’t even know what the fuck we’re talking about. All business is, is moving units in and out almost like binary code the only variables are the product, the people, and the assets. So let’s get our heads together and pretend some things up so we can keep making this ridiculous amount of money from this place. I still can’t believe these people are sitting in Director or VP roles. Steve, how are those doctored spreadsheets coming? I have to explain them in a PowerPoint slide later to like 5 people that could give two shits about what I’m saying”. Anyways, let’s go grab a 7 hour lunch, we’re logging hours, baby! Synergy, syyyynergyyyy!!
wtf
I’m spot on, just admit Jimothy. I’m always right and you’re always wrong on here. That’s how this relationship works, alright
I was going for the three letter acronym that describes my feelings towards you
You clever bastard, Jim *shaking fist in the air*
Please make this a series, I need to know someone else is in the same world of pain as I am
It will be.
My buddy consulted at a big bank in Manhattan. He didn’t have a working computer for over 2 months. When he finally got a working computer, he didn’t have an active account to log in to. When he finally got a working account, he didn’t have the security permissions needed to access his files. By the time he got all this squared away, his project was done.
I’m sure that bank really wanted his input.
House of Lies is a great show.
Maybe one of the most underrated, ever?
That would be The Wire
I don’t think so. There’s a pretty wide consensus that The Wire is of the greatest TV shows ever made.
One of the*
“We need to better utilize our bandwidth to increase the groups synergy to streamline our sales pipeline”
That’s as many buzzwords as I could fit in 1 sentence
“The first thing we need to do, like the VERY FIRST THING we need to do, is figure out what we’re trying to do here.”
You are clearly recycling content from your 2/19/16 article here, but, as a fellow consultant, that actually reads to me as very on brand and efficient.
Live and die by the SMEs homie