Joel Spolsky has an engaging summary of a (the ?) consultancy business model.   A more specialist audience will particularly enjoy the exploration of the underlying validity of some aspects of parametric modelling, but there is fun to be had for everyone:

Here is how the game is played.

Big Consulting Company calls up Big Oil Company. "Hey," they say, "do you guys need help being more productive developing software?"

Big Oil Company says, "Yeah, sure, whatever, we’ll buy anything," and they buy a $1,000,000 software productivity consulting deal.

The consulting company comes on site, measures a bunch of bogus things like Lines of Code Per Developer, or, if they’re really fancy shmancy, Number of Function Points Per Programmer Per Day. Then they tell the oil company, "Gosh, you’re only getting 73.844% productivity. Pay us another $2,000,000 and we’ll double your productivity."

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