Joel Spolsky on productivity consultants.

It's an interesting description of a reasonably common scam. Joel wrote:

A management consultant at Bain wrote me a nice email, that included the
following sentence:

"Our team is conducting a benchmarking effort to gather an outside-in view
on development performance metrics and best practice approaches to issues
of process and organization from companies involved in a variety of
software development (and systems integration)."

I didn't understand a thing he wrote. The email contained a lot of words
(benchmarking, outside in, performance metrics, best practice, process and
organization) each of which set off a loud buzzing alarm-like sound in my
head. The noise from the buzzing was so loud and so distracting that I
found myself completely unable to parse the email.