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You know what I'm talking about. No matter how frugal you may be with your system, there are times when you get frustrated and think you'll fix the problem by throwing money at it. It rarely works, does it?

What We Do
Instead of spending the time investigating the problem, we get our purchase orders and drag in anyone that we think is a candidate to do something for us. We don't know what exactly they need to do, but something needs to be done! Because we don't have a clear understanding of the issues at hand, we can't monitor the situation, and we often end up with unexpected and unwanted results. It's called "the law of unintended consequences."

Here's what we could do but we don't think we have time for it. Let's do a little investigation on our own to determine approximately what we need, and then a bit more investigation to find the right people to handle it for us. Along the way, we would invest some more time keeping up with these "experts" we've handed the work over to, in order to make sure we not only selected the right people, but also to make sure that they understand what we're expecting from them.

Up front, we hesitate to make this time commitment. In the end, it often takes us just as much or more time to get our tasks finished, but with more aggravation and longer calendar time, as we seem to need more iterations to get what we want and also what the clients want.

Self-Motivated Experts
Some people are so good at what they do and so motivated that they need very little monitoring. In this case, the question is whether you can leave them entirely alone to do the task. Ultimately, there is probably no case where you wouldn't at least get together with the person periodically to ask about what they're doing and the progress they're making. Here are some things to consider, however, in selecting someone to work with you:

1. Have you had these people work on your tasks before?



2. Do you know for a fact that they've done similar tasks, i.e., you have evidence beyond the fact that they told you that they had?



3. If you've worked with them before, do these people seem to "get" what you're asking for in most cases?



4. Whose career is on the line if this task fails or is late?

It's my opinion that question # 4 is the most important one on this list. More often than you would believe, I hear customers or potential customers tell me that they really don't know anything about some particular LIMS issue, or maybe about LIMS, in general. This person with the problem will go to someone they think should be an expert on this topic, or to a person who has claimed to be an expert on this topic, hands the problem over, and gets a big failure in return, with a great deal of money gone.

At this point, the person tells me something like, "How did this happen to ME?"/"How could they do this to ME?"/"How can I explain to my managers I spent all this money and have NO results to show?"

In The End
Whose fault is the failure, anyway? I say that it doesn't matter, because if you spent the money, your company will probably hold you accountable for it. This is why you want to put in the extra time to check out your so-called "expert" and to understand, at the least, the basics of what needs to be done.

In the end, throwing money at a problem usually seems like the easiest course of action, and I'll admit that it's a hard strategy to ignore when you're really busy. However, as in so many other aspects of life, the path that seems the easiest often isn't.

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