Recruiting square pegs for round holes

Currently looking for a new client, and as usual most advertisements include the idea that the would-be employer will only consider consultants with a strong background in [insert name of business sector/activity/system here]. Looking at a potential client with a requirement to build IT management systems and processes in the London financial sector, they say that they will only consider candidates with a strong risk system background.

I have worked in lots of sectors – software development, credit cards, insurance, defence, manufacturing, insurance – and I can’ t say that knowing about how the business worked made any substantial difference to how they needed to build their IT development management systems – methods, tools, reporting, etc. Basically, this is one case where the nature of the solution that is being built has far more in common with other solutions of that technical nature (i.e., other IT systems) than it has with other kinds of solution in that sector. So all development methodologies tend to look the same, all project management tools, all reporting systems... And why not? 80% of the time, the code for a word process is indistinguishable from the code for a bank system or a helicopter command-and-control systems.

But of course the business knows best. So they ask someone who knows all about helicopters – or insurance policies, or whatever – to build their processes, and they get ... a lump of dead, mechanical ‘process’ that looks like it was written by Franz Kafka and goes down like a lead balloon with developers.

A related mistake is to recruit someone who is good at a job to build management systems that will help other people do that job just as well. Seems sensible until you ask yourself whether you recruit a racing driver – even a very good one – to design your car. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t even care if they had a driving license, so long as they had a long track record in designing race-winning cars.