Consultant is a professional worker or service to support business activities. The area of consultant can vary from business matters, technology, and so on according to wikipedia. However, I thought that there was limitation of consultant advice.
Limitation of understanding business and technology
I believe any industries utilize IT to some extent. Some companies utilize IT to automate operations. Some companies provide IT products to generate sales. IT could be small factors for some industries and be big factors for others. IT could be a piece of variables to be considered as part of managing companies. However, IT knowledge varies and needs special training and study and require substantial time to be acquired. On the other hand, business also has many areas to learn such as finance, accounting, marketing, organization, leadership, law, ethics. It would be challenging to understand all aspects of business and technology.
Limitation of finding issues
IT Products (software, system) are invisiable. It is difficult to understand all aspects of the products. However, the strcture of source code, quality of the code, could make difference on productivity. If it is bad, engineers could take more time to add new features and maintain the products. Also users or planners who want to add new features often don’t know what they want to create. The new feature requirement could need more time to build the system. It could be important not only to have people who can consider the best way to build but also to have proper process. All of those aspects could determine the speed of the output (in other words, productivity or velocity). In order to find the bottleneck, it could require understanding of the business and techonology and it could require a lot of time to understand both.
Limitation of finding solutions to maximize values
Even if you find technical limitations, you need to explain business people. Even if you find business related issues, the solution may not be the best when you take the technical limitation into account. In order to find the best solution to maximize output, you need to know both or you need to listen to others carefully and understand the limitation which you are not familiar with. People tend not to understand outside area and it’s really not easy to find the best solution. Consultant can be difficult to find the best solutions within limited time.