About The Author
Donald Hook is the founder of Full On Consulting, a technology and management consulting firm helping companies successfully leverage technology and deliver their initiatives.
He is a former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Partner for a $14B IT services firm with 50,000+ employees globally. He has spent his career on both sides of the table — running large delivery organizations and leading clients through complex transformations. He knows exactly how these firms operate from the inside.
For information about Donald Hook, please visit LinkedIn. He can be reached at dhook@fullonconsulting.com
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I have spent over 20 years in enterprise IT — as a CIO, as a CTO, and as a Partner and executive inside one of the world’s largest IT services firms. I have sat in boardrooms where implementation strategies were designed not around the client’s success, but around maximizing revenue and protecting the firm’s margins. I have watched senior consultants presented during the sales process quietly disappear once the contract was signed. I have seen clients billed for change orders on work that was clearly in scope. I have seen project teams pulled at the most critical moment of delivery because the client wouldn’t sign a new support contract.
I am writing this article because these behaviors are not rare. They are systematic — an industry-wide pattern that costs clients billions of dollars every year and erodes trust in a profession that, at its best, genuinely transforms businesses. The data is stark: according to McKinsey and Oxford research, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over schedule on average, while delivering 56% less value than predicted. Gartner estimates that 75% of ERP implementations exceed their original budget. More than half result in major operational disruptions.
These are not just technology failures. Many of them are vendor failures — failures of integrity, accountability, and the basic commitment to deliver what was promised. The good news is that once you know the patterns, you can protect yourself. And there is a better way to engage a consulting partner — one built on transparency, senior expertise, and a genuine commitment to your long-term success.
The Real-World Cost: When Vendor Failures Make the News
The behaviors described in this article are not hypothetical. They play out in courtrooms and boardrooms with regularity. A few of the most well-documented examples:
Hershey — $100M+ in Lost Orders
Hershey's SAP implementation became one of the most infamous IT disasters in history. Despite consultants recommending a 48-month implementation timeline, management was pushed to compress it to 30 months. The result: Hershey's was unable to process orders during its most critical selling season — Halloween. The company missed more than $100 million in orders, disappointed major retail partners across the country, and saw its stock drop nearly 10%. The lesson is not that SAP failed. The lesson is that the implementation partner and internal leadership allowed an unrealistic timeline to override sound delivery judgment — and the client paid the price.
Waste Management vs. SAP — $500M Lawsuit
Waste Management filed suit against SAP alleging that the software demonstrations used to win the contract were manipulated — shown as fully functional when they were not. The initial lawsuit sought $100M in damages, which was later increased to $500M. SAP ultimately acknowledged that the demonstrations did not reflect the actual software's capabilities. This case illustrates one of the most damaging practices in enterprise software sales: showing clients what they want to see during the evaluation process, then delivering something very different after the contract is signed.
Revlon — SAP S/4HANA Shuts Down a Factory
Revlon's S/4HANA implementation was so disruptive it shut down a core manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company could not ship $64 million in products and spent $53.6 million to remediate the damage. Revlon's own leadership cited poor ERP design, inadequate process mapping, failed integration, and breakdown in IT governance. What is notable is that none of these failures are technical mysteries — they are the predictable result of an implementation partner prioritizing speed of deployment over the quality of delivery.
ScanSource vs. Avanade — $17M Becomes $66M
ScanSource engaged Avanade for a Microsoft Dynamics AX implementation with an initial estimate of $17 million over 11 months. The project ballooned to nearly $66 million and three years. ScanSource filed suit alleging bait-and-switch sales tactics, claiming that highly skilled consultants were promised and never delivered. The suit alleged that Avanade's RFP included resumes of senior consultants who never worked on the account. This is not an isolated case — it is a documented practice at many large firms.
14 Tactics We Have Seen IT Consulting Firms Use on Their Clients
These are not rumored behaviors. These are patterns I have personally witnessed — sometimes as the person being asked to implement them, and more often as the consultant brought in to help a client recover from them. Each one represents a deliberate prioritization of the firm’s short-term revenue over the client’s long-term success.
1 - Pulling the Team at the Most Critical Moment
One of the most calculated tactics in the industry: a firm deliberately withdraws key resources during go-live preparation — the period when the client is most vulnerable and least able to absorb the disruption. The purpose is coercion. The message to the client is unmistakable: sign a support SOW for additional revenue, or we leave. We have seen clients forced into contracts they did not need and did not want because they had no other choice with a go-live two weeks away. This is not a negotiating tactic. It is a form of client hostage-taking.
2 - Holding Clients Hostage — Refusing to Work Until the Contract Is Renegotiated
A variation of the same tactic: work simply stops. Resources go silent. Deliverables are placed on hold. The consulting firm refuses to continue until the client agrees to revised commercial terms. This typically happens when the firm has determined that its original bid was insufficient to generate the margin it wanted. The client, mid-implementation and exposed, has little choice. The original contract price becomes irrelevant — what matters now is what it will cost to keep the project from collapsing entirely.
3 - The Bait-and-Switch: Selling the 'A Team,' Delivering the Bench
This is one of the most pervasive practices in the industry. During the sales and RFP process, the consulting firm presents its most experienced senior consultants — the people who win the client's trust and close the deal. Once the contract is signed, those individuals disappear. They are replaced by less experienced, lower-cost resources. We have seen projects staffed entirely by consultants in their first or second year of their career, billed at rates of $350–$400 per hour, who had never worked on an enterprise-scale program. The ScanSource v. Avanade case documented this practice in a federal lawsuit. The original RFP included senior consultant resumes. None of them ever showed up.
4 - Resource Swapping — Pulling Good People When a Better Opportunity Appears
Even when a firm does initially assign qualified consultants, those individuals are frequently pulled mid-engagement and placed on higher-priority or more profitable accounts. The client receives whoever is available — not whoever is qualified. This is particularly damaging on complex implementations where context and institutional knowledge are critical. When a key architect or program manager is swapped out at month four of a twelve-month engagement, the replacement spends weeks catching up — at the client's expense.
5 - Junior Resources Billed at Senior Rates
The economics of large consulting firms create a structural incentive to staff engagements with the least experienced people who can plausibly fill the role. Junior consultants who are new to the industry — sometimes with less than one year of experience — are billed to clients at $350–$400 per hour. These individuals often do not understand enterprise-scale project delivery practices, do not know the platform they are implementing, and require significant oversight that the client is also paying for. The client is simultaneously paying for inexperience and for the supervision of that inexperience.
6 - Resources Pulled Off the Street With No Consulting Background
At the extreme end of the staffing problem: we have encountered cases where consulting firms, under capacity pressure, placed individuals on enterprise engagements who had never worked in a consulting environment at all. These individuals did not understand delivery methodology, governance frameworks, client communication norms, or basic project management practices. The client organization — often with limited IT staff of its own — had no way to detect the gap until the consequences became visible.
7 - Death by a Thousand Change Orders
Change order abuse is one of the most financially damaging and legally defensible tactics in the industry. A consulting firm's SOW is drafted broadly enough that almost any additional client request can be classified as out of scope. Work that a reasonable reading of the contract would include as part of the original engagement is instead presented as a change request, with a new price attached. Over the course of a twelve-month implementation, dozens of small change orders accumulate into a contract value far exceeding the original estimate. The original bid price was designed to win the deal — not to reflect the actual cost of delivery.
8 - SOW Resources Different From Engagement Resources
The team described in the SOW — with their specific backgrounds, certifications, and experience levels — is often not the team that shows up. The SOW team was assembled to win the contract. The engagement team is assembled from whoever is available. More insidiously, the effort estimates in the SOW are often built around the skills and productivity of the SOW team. When those individuals are replaced by less experienced resources, the same work takes longer — generating additional charges without any corresponding increase in the firm's cost.
9 - No Detailed Project Plan — Deliberately
A vague project plan is not always an oversight. In some cases, it is a strategy. Without a detailed project plan that commits the vendor to specific activities, milestones, and resource assignments by date, the client has no meaningful basis for holding the vendor accountable. Progress is reported against high-level phases that provide the appearance of forward movement while concealing slippage. When disputes arise, the absence of specificity in the plan creates ambiguity that the vendor exploits. We have seen firms resist detailed planning exercises precisely because specificity creates accountability.
10 - More Focused on Billing Than Delivering
This is the most fundamental misalignment in the industry: a firm's financial model rewards time-on-engagement, not outcomes. Every hour billed is revenue. Efficiency — finishing faster, with fewer resources, at lower cost — directly reduces the firm's income. The incentive structure of most large consulting engagements is structurally opposed to the client's interests. We have seen project timelines extended without justification. We have seen teams padded with resources who had no defined role. We have seen phases repeated because the original work was inadequate — and billed again as if it were new work.
11 - Salespeople and Account Executives Who Disappear After the Deal
The account executive who was responsive, engaged, and attentive throughout the sales process frequently becomes unreachable once the contract is signed. Client requests go unanswered for days. Escalation paths are unclear. Issues that require executive intervention at the client firm are treated as operational matters by the consulting firm. Clients are made to feel like second-class citizens — their urgency is not urgent, their concerns are not concerns. The message, implicit but unmistakable, is that they are no longer the priority now that the deal is closed.
12 - Taking Total Control of Dev, Test, and Production Environments — Then Leaving
This pattern is particularly damaging in technology implementations: a consulting firm takes full administrative control of the client's development, testing, and production environments. Over time, no one on the client side understands what has been built, how it is configured, or how to maintain it. When the engagement ends — whether planned or abruptly — there is no knowledge transfer, no transition plan, and no documentation. The client is left dependent on the same firm that built a system only that firm understands, often at whatever price the firm chooses to charge for ongoing support.
13 - The Acquisition Termination
A consulting firm that has been performing adequately — or even well — is acquired by a larger organization. Priorities shift. The engagement becomes less strategically important to the new parent company. Resources are redeployed. The project is wound down. The client, who built a relationship and a dependency with the original firm, is left mid-engagement with no clear path forward. We have seen this happen during critical phases of multi-year programs. The acquiring company has no obligation to the original client relationship — and often no interest in honoring it.
14 - Misaligned Financial Incentives — Short-Term Revenue Over Long-Term Partnership
All of the behaviors above are symptoms of the same underlying disease: a business model that rewards winning contracts and maximizing hours billed, rather than delivering outcomes and building relationships. Large consulting firms are measured on utilization rates, revenue per consultant, and contract value — not client satisfaction, delivery quality, or long-term retention. The result is an industry that is structurally oriented toward the firm's financial interests and away from the client's operational success. The partners who built their careers delivering real results are often outvoted by the partners who built their careers selling deals.
Why Long-Term Partnership Is the Only Model That Works
I want to be direct about something. The short-term tactics described above are not just ethically problematic — they are strategically self-defeating. Every client who is treated this way never comes back. Every project that fails publicly damages the firm’s reputation in ways that no marketing budget can fully repair. Every relationship that ends in a lawsuit or a remediation engagement costs far more than the margin that was extracted by cutting corners.
The firms that have built enduring practices — that have clients who return engagement after engagement, who refer their peers, who expand relationships over time — are the firms that operate on a fundamentally different premise. They believe that when a client succeeds, the firm succeeds. Not as a marketing message. As a core operating principle that shapes every staffing decision, every contract negotiation, and every delivery commitment they make.
The economics are not complicated. A client who trusts you and returns for a second engagement costs nothing to acquire. A client who refers a peer generates revenue with no sales overhead. A reputation built on consistently delivering what you promised is worth more than any single engagement padded with change orders. The long-term model is not just more ethical — it is more profitable.
How Full On Consulting Does Things Differently
Full On Consulting was built in direct reaction to everything described in this article. Having spent years inside large IT services firms — watching these practices from the inside and seeing their consequences firsthand — I made a deliberate choice to build something different. Here is what that looks like in practice:
No Junior Staffing Model
Every engagement is staffed with senior consultants who have the experience to deliver what they are assigned to deliver. We do not bill junior resources at senior rates. We do not pad teams. The person you meet during the sales process is the person who works on your engagement.
Transparent Scope and Detailed Project Plans
We commit to specifics — specific activities, specific milestones, specific resource assignments, specific dates. A detailed project plan is not a bureaucratic formality. It is the foundation of accountability for both sides. It tells you exactly what to expect from us, and it gives you a clear basis for holding us accountable if we fall short.
Honest Estimates — Built to Deliver, Not to Win
We estimate engagements based on what we genuinely believe it will take to deliver the outcome, not based on what it takes to be the lowest bid. If our estimate is higher than a competitor's, we will explain exactly why. A bid that is designed to win the deal rather than deliver the work is not a bid — it is a liability.
Knowledge Transfer Is Non-Negotiable
Every engagement includes documented knowledge transfer. We build your team's capability, not their dependency on us. The goal of every engagement is to leave your organization in a stronger position than we found it — with the knowledge, documentation, and internal capability to sustain what we delivered.
Relationships Over Transactions
We measure our success by client outcomes and long-term relationships, not by hours billed or contract value. Most of our work comes from clients who have engaged us before and from the referrals they generate. That model only works if we consistently deliver what we promise — and it is the model we are committed to.
We Have Sat in the CIO and CTO Seat
Our founder has served as a CIO and CTO. He has been on the client side of every engagement type we deliver. He knows what it feels like to be misled by a vendor, to receive a team that was not what was promised, and to discover mid-program that the original estimate was designed to win a deal rather than to be achievable. That experience shapes every commitment we make.
How to Protect Your Organization When Engaging a Consulting Firm
If you are in the process of evaluating a consulting partner — or if you are already in an engagement and seeing warning signs — here are the most important steps you can take to protect your organization:
- Name names in the SOW. Do not sign a contract that references “resources with X years of experience.” Name the specific individuals who will be assigned to your engagement. Include a provision requiring written approval before any key resource is replaced.
- Require a detailed project plan within 30 days. A high-level roadmap is not a project plan. Require a task-level plan with assigned resources and committed dates before the engagement enters execution. If a vendor resists, ask yourself why.
- Own your environments. Administrative credentials for your development, test, and production systems belong to your organization. Do not allow a vendor to be the sole administrator of any environment that supports your business operations.
- Build a paper trail from day one. Document every commitment, every delay, every resource change. If a dispute arises, your documentation is your leverage.
- Engage an independent advisor. For engagements over $500K, the cost of an independent project advisor — someone with no relationship to the implementation vendor — is typically recovered many times over through better governance, earlier issue detection, and stronger contract enforcement.
- Know your escalation rights. Your contract almost certainly includes escalation procedures. Know what they are before you need them. The time to understand your leverage is not after a crisis has developed.
If you are already in trouble — if you are seeing missed milestones, unexplained resource changes, ballooning change orders, or a vendor that has become unresponsive — do not wait. The organizations that recover fastest are the ones that engage independent help early, while there is still time to redirect the engagement rather than rescue it.
We have helped companies recover failed implementations, replace vendors mid-engagement, renegotiate contracts at the CEO level, and salvage programs that were weeks from collapse. It is always possible to course-correct. It is always better to act sooner.
WHY FULL ON CONSULTING
Senior Consultants Only
Every engagement is led and delivered by senior consultants — former CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise IT executives. You get the people you were sold, not a bait-and-switch to junior staff after the contract is signed.
$40M+ in Documented Savings
Our track record includes $40M+ in verified client savings, a $130M M&A integration across 90+ global facilities, and an end-user computing transformation for 18,000 employees. We deliver measurable outcomes — not just recommendations.
20+ Years of Enterprise Experience
Our consultants average 20+ years of enterprise IT experience across Fortune 500 and mid-market companies. We have run the same programs we are being asked to lead — across SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and large-scale transformations.
Strategy Through Execution
We do not hand you a strategy deck and walk away. Our teams stay engaged from initial assessment through go-live — accountable for outcomes, not just deliverables. If we recommend it, we are prepared to execute it.
Boutique Agility
As a boutique firm, we move faster, adapt to your priorities, and work with your team rather than around it. No bureaucracy, no layers of overhead — just focused, senior-led execution from day one.
A Partner, Not a Vendor
We build long-term relationships grounded in trust and integrity. Many of our clients have engaged us across multiple initiatives and refer us to peers — because we do what we say we will do, every time.
