Analyst for hire -service

One of the services provided by Varjus Consulting Oy is an "Analyst for Hire" -service. The number of skilled analysts within the companies is one of the bottlenecks to develop the needed amount of ML applications. Many times the demand coming from business is much higher than the throughput of the analytics team. In these occasions, it may be ideal to hire an external analyst to help to fill in the excess demand. 

But, when utilizing external experts to help with the ML development you should remember couple of things. First of all, you need to include a proper hand-over of the performed analysis back to the team member (or team members). You do not want the acquired expertise and knowledge to leave the company afterwards. And, you do not want to end-up to be dependent on one specific analyst. The minimum requirement is to have a proper documentation for the done analysis, but more thorough walk-trough of the process might be needed. 

Second, especially if you have a team of analysts of your own, then, don't outsource what you can't currently do. If you outsource the development of some new analysis, you easily become dependent on that external resource and that tends to become quite expensive. Another thing is, that your team members may become jealous of that development work. Especially, if they are still assigned the same old tasks they've been doing for long. Rather, give your team the new challenge and outsource their current tasks. That way you gain much better control over the analytical operations on the long run. 

Remember, the "don't outsource what your team can't do" does not mean that you should only do what your team currently can do. It is perfectly OK and sometime even recommended to use external expertise to develop new analyses, but they should be actually performed, and owned, by your team.