Rafe Colburn has a nice rant on consultants and why the applications they produce are often a bit weak. My favorite quotes are:
The bottom line is that the core skill for many consultants (and, no doubt, trainers) is willingness to travel, and TMC is a company that sells consulting and training. While there are certainly some fine consultants out there, most of the best are either working on their own so that they don't bill $200 an hour and take home $40 an hour.
Don't be surprised if you consultants fit into this category, most do! So why does this belong in the agile category? Well...
Consulting teaches you many bad habits, mainly due to the fact that they never have to own existing applications over a long period of time. That shields you from the day to day work of maintaining, refactoring, and optimizing applications that are the responsibility of people who work on commercial software or even internal projects.
Given an agile approach, no one can put off the maintaining, refactoring, and optimizing. The myth of the consultant would hold that they can bring "packaged expertise" to an enterprise. It should be no surprise that the real packaged expertise is the maintaining, refactoring, and optimizing that must be done as the system lives within the enterprise. If your consultant gets to walk away when the project is "done", you should be worried.
11:54:11 AM 
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