General Consultant Discussion

Why is it that IT folks insist on talking via phone and not by e-mail? I guess it's easier for them to record billable time with phone calls?

Maybe they don't know how to put their thoughts into words!!!! Being able to communicate via the written word is a dying art.

I can't get IT people to pick up the phone and have the freakin' conversation instead of sending 50 emails back and forth.

Damn if you do, damn if you don't. Perhaps you should just trade clients...............

I have the IT guy who won't stop talking -- only after guilting me into adding ""just one easy UDF - surely there's not a fee"" .... and now 10 phone calls later for him to continue to discuss other UDF fields and his integration project to Dynamics and how he doesn't get along with the accounting department.....

@JohnShaver - I feel the same way. Some consultants that charge by the hour have no problem chatting away about a project. ... and the weather ... and the local sports team ... and whatever else they have on their mind. As long as the client gets billed.

Mercifully, this ended up being a short call. I'm sure our customer will still get their 0.1 bill from the IT guy! His utilization rate just ticked up! Or is it realization rate? I never could understand any of that crap.

My little MAS practice resides within an IT business and IMHO, they do live in their own world , but then, so do I. Fortunately for me, our inhouse IT group pretty much understands they are in business to server the customer. Other IT groups I have run into defintely don't see it that way. If a phone call is important (IT or other), I like to follow the call with an email summarizing my understanding of the call which makes it more difficult for either of us to conveniently forget what was said. Sometimes, this results in additional communication.