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Is there really a shortage of people to work on your LIMS project? Participating in dialogues with customers, recruiting firms, consulting firms, consulting organizations, and consultants, I've found some differences of opinion.

What do the statistics say? As any recruiter can tell you, more people are giving up consulting to take permanent jobs and, as any consulting organization can tell you, more people are giving up permanent jobs to become consultants. So much for statistics!

Many people seem to be having a difficult time finding people to do their projects, LIMS or otherwise. At the same time, I frequently run across consultants that are trying to find projects. The problem appears to be in linking people that need work done with people to do the work. This article addresses that challenge.

If you don't know where to start or wonder if your expectations are reasonable, there are sections below on each. At the bottom, there is a section just for those people with a preferred vendor program.

Where to Start — Web-Sites
If you were looking for a consultant to program Visual Basic, you could look on a large number of web-sites to find someone. Even specialized software packages such as PeopleSoft have 3rd-party web-sites (www.peoplesoftfans.com) where people post projects to be done or post their availability to work on projects. I have not found a centralized place for LIMS consulting. It is not that there are not places that could serve this function, but the ones that I have been though do not seem to be used this way. The LIMSource website (www.limsource.com) is the closest site I have found to this for the LIMS industry. It has some resource listings both for large consulting firms, as well as the smaller firms or independent consultants, and allows specific postings for a fee. There is no cost for you to look at the list of firms and the services they provide.

Although there are many web-sites devoted to helping people find consultants, very few seem to have any postings related to LIMS, and most charge various fees. Here are some that I have found that do have LIMS-related postings and do charge fees. One is DICE (www.dice.com), which I mention first because it appears to have a high traffic of LIMS postings. Others are Net-Temps (www.net-temps.com), and computerjobs.com (www.computerjobs.com). These sites allow jobs to be posted or for a search among available consultants. For someone looking for many people for a large project or for people on an ongoing basis, these options might be a something to consider.

If your LIMS needs are not specific to a propriety product, you can find people with other skills through these sites, and there are other places to look, as well. The Independent Computer Consultants Association (www.icca.org) is a resource for most of the more common computer consulting needs. If you need a project manager, and cannot find one that specifically does LIMS project management, you might check with the Project Management Institute (www.pmi.org), which has links to organizations that include project management consulting services. These are just a couple examples of organizations that provide links to associated resources. There are organizations for just about anything you want to find, and many organizations provide some sort of contact listing to its members.

If you want a large number of options from the Internet, go to any search engine and type in the keywords that apply (e.g., "LIMS", "LIMS Consulting", "LIMS Project Manager"). I tried this and was too overwhelmed to sort through the responses, but it's an option you might consider.

If you were looking for a consultant to program Visual Basic, you could look on a large number of web-sites to find someone. Even specialized software packages such as PeopleSoft have 3rd-party web-sites (www.peoplesoftfans.com) where people post projects to be done or post their availability to work on projects. I have not found a centralized place for LIMS consulting. It is not that there are not places that could serve this function, but the ones that I have been though do not seem to be used this way. The LIMSource website (www.limsource.com) is the closest site I have found to this for the LIMS industry. It has some resource listings both for large consulting firms, as well as the smaller firms or independent consultants, and allows specific postings for a fee. There is no cost for you to look at the list of firms and the services they provide.

Although there are many web-sites devoted to helping people find consultants, very few seem to have any postings related to LIMS, and most charge various fees. Here are some that I have found that do have LIMS-related postings and do charge fees. One is DICE (www.dice.com), which I mention first because it appears to have a high traffic of LIMS postings. Others are Net-Temps (www.net-temps.com), and computerjobs.com (www.computerjobs.com). These sites allow jobs to be posted or for a search among available consultants. For someone looking for many people for a large project or for people on an ongoing basis, these options might be a something to consider.

If your LIMS needs are not specific to a propriety product, you can find people with other skills through these sites, and there are other places to look, as well. The Independent Computer Consultants Association (www.icca.org) is a resource for most of the more common computer consulting needs. If you need a project manager, and cannot find one that specifically does LIMS project management, you might check with the Project Management Institute (www.pmi.org), which has links to organizations that include project management consulting services. These are just a couple examples of organizations that provide links to associated resources. There are organizations for just about anything you want to find, and many organizations provide some sort of contact listing to its members.

If you want a large number of options from the Internet, go to any search engine and type in the keywords that apply (e.g., "LIMS", "LIMS Consulting", "LIMS Project Manager"). I tried this and was too overwhelmed to sort through the responses, but it's an option you might consider.

Besides Web-Sites
One of the best ways to find someone is through referrals. If you attend your LIMS User Group meeting, other users will sometimes have the names of reliable resources that you can contact. Even without going to your own LIMS User Group meeting, if you know other users with similar systems, they are a good place to start, and might know someone else who can help you.

The LIMS List discussion group* has occasional postings from folks looking for consultants, but rarely do folks post to say they are available or what their services are, which is probably due to the "no advertising" theme of that discussion group. If you want to look for someone via the LIMS List, you would have to post that you are looking for a consultant. Asking the list if folks had done that, I only got one response. That person found someone that way without getting an overwhelming number of replies. On top of that, the LIMS List is entirely free.

* To subscribe to the LIMS mailing list, send an e-mail to majordomo@lims.taratec.com saying 'subscribe lims your_e-mail_address' in the body of your message (do not use quotes & substitute your real e-mail address, of course).

Setting Your Expectations
You will be extremely lucky to find a LIMS consultant in your city, let alone your state. The needs of the LIMS industry are not great enough (relative to other industries) to create a large number of consultants in any particular geographic area, unless you happen to live close to the office of a large LIMS consulting firm.

Let's suppose that you are finding potential resources but none are interested in your project. It might be time to take a good look at your project to find its strengths. Questions to consider:

• If you are requiring the resource to work on your site, is there a way that you can minimize the time the person must be out of their office? Consider whether you can be any more flexible about work being done off your site.


• Is the rate you are offering appropriate for the type of consultant you are looking for. For example, if you are offering $N/hour for Brand X LIMS consulting, is that the going rate? If the rate is too low, you are limiting the number of interested parties. Of course, if the rate is too high, you are just paying too much for the service.


• Are there any other restrictions that you have placed on finding someone that could be limiting the number of responses to your request?

If you have an outside firm searching for you that does not specialize in LIMS consulting, be sure they understand something of the LIMS industry, including the rates and the general availability of resources.

Preferred Vendors and Subcontracting
If your company requires you to go through a preferred vendor and that vendor does not have a LIMS resource to put on your project, the chance that your preferred vendor will be able to find a LIMS resource for you will vary. If your preferred vendor has no LIMS consulting group of their own, it is unlikely that they will find a qualified person for you. If your preferred vendor does have such a group of their own, chances are fairly good that they would know where to look to find a resource for you when theirs are all busy. This is especially true if the resources in their group are exactly what you would have wanted on your own project. People usually know others that do similar work.

On the subject of subcontracting, though, anyone's ability to subcontract for you depends on several other factors:

• Your preferred vendor might not deal with subcontracts.


• The consulting firm your preferred vendor finds resources in might not deal with subcontracts.


• Your company's contract with your preferred vendor might disallow subcontracting.

Finally
If you need resources within a specific time-frame, it's never too early to start looking. If you have secured a resource ahead of time, keep track of that resource to ensure that they'll be around when you actually start the project. If you don't, you might find that your resource has been pulled into someone else's project about the time you're ready to start.

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