Why use consultants?

I have many thoughts about why consulting provides better business value for companies than hiring full time employees. One of the reasons is that in the application development world, there seems to be two distinctly different personality types: Developers and Maintainers. Developers are creative, they, like artists, builders or architects, are excellent at creating new solutions where none previously existed.

Maintainers are trouble shooters. They are excellent at unwinding why something doesnt work, and making corrections to make it work. We often call them the forensic scientists of application development. Their role is less about building and more about fixing. Typically this role is less valued and the pay rates for those willing to do maintenance is significantly less than it is for developers.

Developers enjoy building new products, but once the product is built they are often ready to move on to more interesting pastures, and are not enthused about maintaining their creation. Thus, often times the intellectual capital associated with their role in the creation departs the company, and most often not at the time favored by the company. Maintainers are soon hired to replace them and so goes the story.

I believe engaging a top notch team of developers who know they are going to go away after the product is created provides for a less expensive full time technical team that is more appropriately matched to the long term goals of the company. The consulting team has expertise at transferring knowledge regarding the application for suitable maintenance, and often the consulting firm can be engaged to provide ongoing support during the transition time (and a nice backup if things go awry), or can even work in a joint environment with maintainers to provide strong knowledge of the interworkings of an application.

I need to work on a model that shows how much money can be saved by working in this fashion.