THE GOOD CONSULTANT – HOW DO YOU ROLL?

Sent in by Emmanuel Conde from CCIE Flyer

http://www.ccieflyer.com/

Check out the site - the guy knows his stuff.

The consultant, there are few jobs where you have to be actor and playwright but a good consultant has to and swiftly learns the balance.  Let’s face it there needs to be a balance struck between billable hours and solution delivery, politics and feasibility as well as practicality and stupidity.  With an audience of “Shoulder Surfers” the typical consultant has to really show his “value add” to the organization while looking for a chance to cross sell or up sell his talents.  In many organizations this may have been started when expectations were set during an RFP process or in the SOW.  (I am using the TLAs here since “The Good Consultant” will know what these terms mean.) 

Politician and Engineer

While a CSM back at the end of the 1990s I was responsible for billable consultants in many different enterprises.  It was easier for me to review the shoulder surfers since I was not steering the keyboard.  Instead I helped my engineers to identify the political morass they would need to maneuver through.  Part of the job of The Good Consultant is to learn how to use his shoulder surfers.  There are surely parrots among them, these are the people who take snippets of what they are hearing and repeat them among the technical staff or to their bosses to make themselves sound knowledgeable.  They are a great tool for up-selling or if one of them has rubbed The Good Consultant wrong feeding them bad data can  make them sound like fools among their peers.  Politics are such a reality of the IT world today.  Back in the old school of IT we were revered and not questioned about solutions we hacked out for our employers.  Today however the world is full of really smart people who kind-a-sort-a know stuff.  These folks too often rise to management levels and then make life a real pain in the posterior.  Making that manager happy is the art form known to The Good Consultant as POLITICS.  As a politician The Good Consultant wins the hearts and minds of as many of the Stake Holders of a project as possible.  Don’t try to win them all that is futile, but winning the right ones will help The Good Consultant survive any SNAFUs.  The Good Consultant as an engineer will deliver the goods that he was hired to provide.  That ethereal grey matter that has allowed The Good Consultant to rise through the ranks of his pears and become the subject matter expert survives even the harshest political environment.

Surviving the Sales Cycle

It is a shame that the toughest part of The Good Consultant’s life might actually be surviving the sales cycle.  That period spent developing a reasonable solution that then gets priced accordingly, coming within a solar system of being accurate, is a harsh proposition at times.  RFP to RFQ to SOW to Delivery to Departure these different phases of the life cycle of a project are well known to The Good Consultant.  Universal are the canings that are administered to The Bad Sales Executive.  That scoundrel who actually underbid the competition, giving away The Good Consultant’s precious time, to lay claim to the trophy of winning the deal shall be caned.  Beating the competition, as The Good Consultant chews his nails pulling out his rapidly thinning hair watching the time he needs to accomplish a project’s many tasks dwindle or be discounted can make even The Good Consultant cry.  The best way to survive the sales cycle is to be engaged in it.  Hopefully as the sharpened pencils begin to devour your good work The Good Consultant can remain the voice of reason.  The ability to remain involved is the mark of The Good Consultant.

The Eagle amongst Turkeys

The flock of talent these days is not always a level bunch.  Many groups are successful working together because there is a knowledge sharing that goes on.   The flock may sound like a bunch of turkeys raising a hue and a cry when questioning a point that is not mastered by one member only to be responded to by another.  The interaction resembles a flock of turkeys that travel together through the woods and one can be heard musing over a pint that the others then respond to as a chorus.   The Good Consultant knows this and will not let ego to crowd in on discussions where he or she is the subject matter expert.  While knowledge sharing is a great way to endear ones’ self to the flock it can also become a point challenged by a turkey.  That one member of the client’s team who has this clear skill may rise to challenge the decisions or results of The Good Consultant eating away at billable time or patience.  The eagle soars above this pettiness and will allow the turkey to maintain their place in the flock by compliment or deference while staying the course.

How Do You Roll?

It is clearly The Good Consultant that can enter and exit the client premise without guilt.  The work done or underway is the best that can be produced and so allows both to breathe easily.  The Good Consultant is the person who is the happiest.  The Good Consultant is good because he or she has maintained honesty, integrity and quality throughout the project and has left the client with a smile.  The Good Consultant rolls with the best.  How Do You Roll?

Life and Times of The Good Consultant

Posted on www.ccieflyer.com:

Welcome one and all.

I'm Leigh Harrison. I'm a Cisco Consultant and champion of Good Consultancy.

I have worked for several Cisco Gold and Silver partners ranging from the very small to the very large. On my travels I have met and worked with many Consultants, some good and some bad.

I have been involved with training and coaching team members for the last 10 years in both technical and non-technical aspects of being a Cisco Consultant. I have leant many things over the years and I have found that there is no real outlet for helping advise on the “soft skills” that are needed by The Good Consultant. So I decided to step up to the plate to offer my thoughts.

Yes, we all know that the technical skills are the most important part of the job – you have to know your stuff to be The Good Consultant - that's a given and there are plenty of websites and blogs to help along with that. But, I feel there is no real guiding path to help with taking the step into becoming a Consultant and very little to help you become The Good Consultant.

To this end, I created a blog called The Good Consultant (http://GoodConsultant.blogspot.com) to try and point people in the right direction. By no means is this site set up to be a definitive list of what is needed to become The Good Consultant, it is merely an outlet for me to share my thoughts with others and (more importantly) for others to share their thoughts. As two heads are always better than one (but more on that in later posts!).

I got in touch with Eman and after some discussions he very kindly offered me the opportunity to have a column in the CCIE Flyer. I assure you, I couldn't want for a better audience from which to draw ideas and inspiration. If anybody has been there, done it and got the t-shirt (or rather the “Number”), it's a hoard of CCIE's spread over every corner of the Globe.

I personally hope to gain a lot from the column. I am always interested in talking to The Good Consultants and learning about their backgrounds, how they got into leading the kind of life they lead and what thoughts they can share and what snippets of knowledge they can impart. I also have several thoughts on the kinds of “soft skills” The Good Consultant should have in his tool kit, right there next to a console cable.

The life of The Good Consultant is not an easy one, but then, nobody ever said it would be. If you're The Good Consultant reading this, then I would be very interested in hearing from you as to your thoughts on what makes a Good Consultant. If you're aspiring to be The Good Consultant, then I would really like to hear from you to understand the “soft skills” that you have and what additional you're working on to reach the status of The Good Consultant.

I look forward to hearing from you and sharing your ideas.

LH