We’ve seen dozens of IT departments with quite large teams, but lacking the expertise to do real high quality work on their systems. In particular it can be quite difficult for people to build deep technical competence in ERP systems. Many IT departments have a high staff turnover (often internal to keep people happy) and/or use people from the business side with no technical background. This leads to teams with many generic capabilities, but few hands-on skills. As a result, “consultants” are hired to do the work, even though from the number of people on the payroll, few external resources should be required. You end up with fifty IT staff “project managing” fifty “consultants”, who do the work the IT staff are paid to do in the first place – in most cases with no or little knowledge transfer. You can rely your own team OR on consultants to get a job done, but don’t pay twice for it.The core message: Doing a skills review and redesigning the skills and sourcing strategies will usually save your organisation a big chunk of money.