 Hi everyone, it's Monica Wajie here again with some more data science career advice for you. I initially wrote a blog post where I explained how it is that I can write your peer-reviewed article for $4,000 when it will cost you at least $10,000 if you hire a public health research consulting company to do it for you. In the blog post, I explained how these public health research consulting teams work and why they are so expensive. Later I realized that probably a lot of my learners out there might end up working at one of these places, so I made a few videos about these kinds of positions, what they do, how they work with the customer, and how they work with each other. Basically, I explained how these consulting teams are put together and how they work together to develop a paper. I also went into how they are managed and the dynamics between the consulting team and the customer. Now this video is aimed more at someone thinking of hiring one of these teams and paying the big bucks. As I've said in previous videos, the main positive side to these teams is that they have excellent expertise. That's why they are so expensive. However, there are huge pitfalls involved in hiring one of these companies, especially if you do it often and come to rely on them. This video is about how to prevent falling into any of those pitfalls if you come to use one of these companies and how to get the best bang for your buck. Okay, in the other videos, I talked about how these teams tend to have three roles represented. A lead researcher who has fewer hours but runs the project from the consulting side and a project coordinator who puts in a lot of hours and does most of the operational work. You also have one or more statisticians or data scientists who maintain the data and do the analytics work. I also showed you the organizational chart of how the team works within a bigger context. You have the lead researcher leading the research team and supervising the project coordinator and the statistician. But the project coordinator and statistician have way more hours on the project than the lead researcher, so they end up dealing with each other a lot. And all the while, the consulting company runs the project by directing the lead researcher, and the customer organization also provides project oversight by connecting with the lead researcher. So the lead researcher, a role requiring no management training that has been assigned few operational hours to the project, is subject to this kind of pressure from two directions. You can see where there is some obvious tension in the system. Let's first adopt the perspective of the consulting company and look at the nature of the pressure on the team coming from that direction. Consulting groups love to make money with the lowest amount of overhead, and the easiest way to do that is to get serial business or to have the same consulting teams work over and over to produce more and more reports and papers for the customer. The consulting company can create a team like this, which becomes totally simpatico with the customer. They tend to generate repeat business, not make any waves with the customer, and sort of manage themselves. If the team just goes on autopilot and the customer never really checks in with them, doesn't demand meetings or any sort of deliverables, and just keeps paying the bill, they love it. And they just keep coming up with new contracts and work, and the customer keeps signing it, and the consulting company loves it. As you probably guessed by the way I said that, there's a lot of money to be made in the public health research consulting industry. But unfortunately, only the owners are making money. The lead epidemiologists and statistician can command a decent salary if they stick around for a while, but the project coordinator is almost always underpaid. The cheapness of these consulting organizations can cause political problems on teams that are made up of both employees of the customer and consultants. Especially if you all travel to a conference or meeting, you can really see how cheap the consulting company is about travel for their employees. If you work at the customer, you often feel like a have, and they are have-nots. When consulting companies are so obviously penny-pinching like this, it really drives down morale. You feel guilty about the way the consultants are treated. Some companies are better than others, but I have been in many awkward situations because of how obvious consulting companies are being with their cheapness towards their own employees, and it's worse, it can get pretty gross. But now let's take the perspective of the customer organization, meaning the organization that is hiring the consultants. These consultants are expensive, so you really need a good reason to hire them and not use your own people for this. Make sure you figure out what that reason is. I remember when I used to work at customer organizations, I'd often inherit these consulting teams. More often than not, it was unclear to me why we had asked the consulting organization to do anything for us, because they seemed to be working on reports that had nothing to do with my organization's strategic goals. So the first thing you should do before you hire these teams is nail down the reason why you are hiring them. What is their purpose? What goal will they fulfill for your organization that you can't fulfill with your own employees? Because there are good and bad reasons to hire one of these consulting research teams. Let me go through a few. Let's start with the good reasons. Here are four good reasons. The first is that this team regularly does a project for you annually or every quarter and they do a good job and you need it done, like some sort of compliance reporting. That's a good use of a team like this. The second good reason that you hire a team to do some consulting for you is if you want to learn their process. If you do that, you can create a blended team with employees and consultants and they can work together on a project. A third good reason to hire a research team like this is you need a certain expertise and they have it and are willing to share it. So if you need a SQL programmer and they have a SQL programmer willing to work with you, that's a good reason to hire them. But the main thing you need to make sure of whenever you hire these teams to do anything is that they are helping you to get to some sort of strategic goal for your department or organization. I made it the fourth reason. Maybe I should have made it the first one. Remember these teams are always trying to sell you something they want to sell you. The question is, is what they are trying to sell you also in your strategic plan? If it is, great. But if it's not, why are you hiring them anyway? Okay, now let's look at the bad reasons to hire a consulting team. Sometimes the first time you hire them, it's for one of those good reasons. But then it can quickly devolve into one of these bad reasons. Like for example, bad reason number one, you are hiring them to do something your organization needs to do but doesn't know how to do anymore. This is because you become dependent on them and now they can jack you around and threaten to pull out of contracts and things like that if you don't do what they say. That's bad. And reason number two is bad. Please don't think you are cool and powerful just because you are commanding around a bunch of consultants. All you are is rich. That's all. They will try to make you feel all cool and strong and special but they are just hoping you will keep throwing money at them. And if reason number three is also true, you are lazy and you want them to do your job for you, you can see how organizations easily get dependent on expensive consulting teams like this. So to be absolutely clear, probably the number one bad reason to hire a consulting company, which I put as number four and probably should have put as number one, is that the consulting company wants you to hire them. It means they have probably come up with some project that they want to do for their own strategic goals and they just want you to pay for it. So you can see all of the moral hazards inherent in getting spoiled by working with one of these teams over and over because if you sit back and just think about it, these research teams are probably the most expensive model you can think of. You have very little overlap of skills among the different positions and they generally don't cross-train. So it's kind of like buying a bunch of one-use kitchen gadgets and cluttering up your kitchen rather than just getting a food processor or blender or something that does multiple functions. So let me give you five pieces of advice if you are thinking of hiring one of these consulting teams to work with your organization. And the theme of my advice is good fences make good neighbors. First, when you make a contract with the group, make a clear statement of work or SOW, explaining what you want them to do. Describe all the deliverables you want them to produce and don't be afraid to provide written specifications. My second piece of advice is to designate a contract manager at the customer organization who actively interfaces with the lead researcher and actively manages the contract. Remember, many consulting companies will try to avoid meeting with you to minimize overhead. Having a designated individual chasing around the lead researcher will help ensure you get your deliverables and they aren't just spending your money for you. My third piece of advice is to build into the process a way to ensure that you have your own staff who will receive back all the files, the code, the documentation, whatever this group did after the project so you can keep a history of the project. This is another thing consulting companies will try to avoid because it increases their overhead and also they like to keep the customer in the dark and therefore dependent upon them. Sometimes I even write this part into their contract to make sure they hand back their code and other goodies before they end the project. After all, we paid for it. And my fourth piece of advice, which probably should be my first piece of advice because it's the most important, is don't become married to these consulting teams. Don't become dependent on them and don't make it a habit of hiring consulting teams. You really don't need them all the time just for specific functions. But actually, if you want my best advice on hiring these consulting companies, here it is. Don't. Just don't. I mean, why hire consultants? Why not just invest in your analytics team and develop skills in your own employees? And I don't mean send them to a boring training event. I mean, do something more relevant, like hiring me to give custom real-time webinars to your team on Skype or Zoom. I've got all this background running data analytics teams. I even wrote this book on data warehousing in SAS. I'll meet with your team, individual members, or the team as a group, and help them solve real data and analytics problems they are facing. That way you just pay me by the hour, but I can actually teach them skills and management, leadership, policy development, data curation, and we can do all this on the job so the work gets done and the experience is totally relevant. I made this video for those of you who are thinking of hiring a data consulting company to do a project at your workplace. Hopefully, the advice I gave you will help you make the right decision and also have a good experience should you actually hire a team. Also, hopefully, I've persuaded you to give a second thought to focusing more on developing your own team rather than hiring consultants. In any case, I hope you've gained some useful knowledge and food for thought from this video. Thanks for watching!