8. They bill by the hour. Don't expect work for free.
If you want a contractor to spend any time on your behalf, be prepared to pay for it. "Every hour worked is billable," says consultant John Bland. And that includes hours spent working outside the office.

"For every hour that I am visibly working on a project, two to three hours have been spent doing unseen work," says Chris Mague, systems administrator at Danger Inc.

You may not be aware of the investment your consultants make in learning the technical (and not-so-technical) details of your assignment. Rudy Limeback is a SQL consultant who has been self-employed for six years. "An hourly consultant will bill not only for time spent actually producing a deliverable, but also for time spent becoming familiar with the client situation in order to make a recommendation. This includes meetings, e-mails, phone calls and reading of background material. Allow the consultant lots of leeway here," Limeback recommends.

Consultants are typically paid differently than contractors. Where contractors charge by the hour, consultants invoice per project. If you intend to hire a consultant, do not ask her to bill you by the hour, advises Scott Barber, president and chief technologist at PerfTestPlus. "As a senior person with expertise in an area in which you (or your team) lacks expertise, a consultant had better know what they are doing," he says. "As such, it is not their time that you are paying them for, it's their results."

9. Treat 'em like people.
Treat contractors and consultants with respect. That means including them in key meetings, providing them with good equipment and offering them comfortable working conditions.

Some managers intentionally give contractors less-than-ideal working conditions because they want to appease their full-time employees, who are often sensitive to any superior treatment the contractors might get. After all, the contractors are frequently retained to develop new applications on new technology while employees are stuck supporting the old software. To compensate, managers give contractors old computers, stained chairs, rickety desks, tiny workspaces, limited parking facilities and even reduced access to the company cafeteria.

Some clients go too far in the other direction: They treat contractors like employees by commanding them to attend a company picnic (unpaid) or to go on a golf outing. Consultants want to be paid for their time, and they aren't motivated to create lasting business relationships when everyone knows the consulting engagement is temporary.

Of course, you're unlikely to respect consultants if you don't care about your existing employees. All too often, a consultant's opinion is given far more credence than the opinions of people who have been working on the problem for months. For example, at one minicomputer company (which is, thankfully, long gone), I was asked to evaluate the QA system for the firm's many language compilers. I asked the employees for their input, who were happy to share their wish lists. I also did some technical analysis of the process, but that was minor. When I presented the "here's what needs to change" data, the managers acted as though I had discovered fire when the information had been available to them all along. Message to CIOs: If you want to keep the working relationship between your full-time staff and your consulting staff constructive and positive, treat each with respect and realize that some of the genius ideas your consultants are presenting may be coming from your own people.

For many IT shops, consultants and contractors are a fact of life. If you apply these nine suggestions to your business, you're sure to get more productive work from happier people and save money to boot.

Esther Schindler is senior online editor at CIO.com. Before her descent into computer journalism, she supported herself as an IT professional and computer consultant. As a contractor and consultant, she optimized compilers, wrote customized add-ons for accounting applications, was an OS/2 network administrator for a utility company, trained corporate users on desktop publishing systems, and installed far too many operating systems on small business computers. Her first online community position—long before becoming BlogMom for CIO's Advice & Opinion section—was as sysop of the CompuServe Computer Consultant's forum. As a result, she finds it impossible to discuss this topic with brevity.