It is interesting being a consultant. Often you have clients who hire you, and then do the work themselves.
So that means that you have to find a justifiable reason to stay on the project. Of course you help them figure out anything that may not be working correctly. You have to be creative and find value-add things that are directly related to saving money or making their life easier.
Financially speaking, it would be cheaper for them to just allow you to do what you are paid to do. I do understand that some people like to figure it out, and have the safety net of a consultant there.
Justifying your salary as a consultant is often a fine line between suggesting best practices and finding related tasks to do. I like being hands on, so when I can’t do something that is ok I find other things that I can do.
Which often means that you write papers describing the benefits of some product or technology and how it could help them. Or you are in lots of meetings talking with product owners and working on a plan to get it all to come together. Often companies are not unified in what they want, so you have lots of discussions with the pros/cons and then they work on it themselves and come back to you with an answer.
I think the reason that most consultants are paid is that we offer a point of view that people in the organization are afraid to do. We argue for off the shelf solutions, when there is a financial pressure to use scripting and difficult to audit and maintain “free” solutions. There is a time for free solutions, but for most security and enterprise businesses this needs to be a larger discussion and not just one off solutions.
For example I love Linux and FOSS and think more companies would benefit by adopting it. The days of MS dominance are waning and companies are doing very viable Mac/Linux solutions. It is interesting that as the older experienced Microsoft consultants retire, more companies are shifting to other OS. I said before that this trend will accelerate due to the high cost of Mac/Windows licensing/purchase costs.
One day with AI and ChatGPT the days of consultants may be over. Not yet however.