Have to admit, Col, that I have met "outside consultants" from time to time and have not been impressed.
Once, about 45 years ago, we hired a team of programming consultants to work on a DEC VAX/VMS project. DEC said that this was an experienced team who really knew VMS. (Or at least, that's what the contract said.) Up front they made it quite clear: They didn't want us to touch the machine they were using, wouldn't even let us do backups. I was nominally the system admin, but once I installed VMS and did the patching to get it up to date, I was only there as a standby resource because they were going to do it all.
Came the day that because the leading consultant didn't understand the utilities he was using (with a wildcard file specification from the root folder), he essentially made all of the first-level file folders look like non-folder files. Fortunately, he did this on the user/development disk, not the system disk. He hadn't actually deleted anything; he had just made the directory files unrecognizable to the file system for all private user folders.. Which meant that nobody could find the files that they had worked on and hadn't backed up for the last six weeks. Potentially about 48-50 person-weeks of coding by their best estimates.
They came to us and asked if we had run a backup even though we weren't supposed to do so. We hadn't. Panic set in. At least two members of the elite team were in tears. There was much consternation in their set-aside work area. Discussions got very loud. Recriminations flew fast and furious to all concerned.
After they tried a lot of suggestions (none of which proved useful), they asked me if there was ANY way I could undo what they did. (At this time, I carefully hid my laughter at a lowly standby System Admin having to bail out the specialist team.) I wrote a script using DCL, the command language of VMS, to directly interact with and patch the file system one directory at a time as a batch job. The patching required not only a little bit of bit-twiddling for each file, but also some checksum recomputation in two different slots per directory file. Took 2 hours to write, 15 minutes to test and verify, and 15 more minutes to do the production run, so that within about 2 1/2 hours everyone had recovered every file. All files present and accounted for, nothing missing.
Shortly thereafer, the project lead consultant/supervisor had a LONG talk in private with our company president, who reminded him who was paying the bills for his team. Shortly after that, we had a schedule of daily incremental backups and weekly full backups for "their" machine.
That wasn't the only run-in I ever had with their consultants, but the other time is another story I'll save for later.