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Follow Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps and become the next Google or Facebook.

Maybe.

Web apps aside. It seems to me the principles are perfectly designed to make any professional services practice a big success.

Wilson’s take revolves around Speed, Utility, Leanness, Fun, and few more.

I started to recall my most successful gigs and any time I reflected on each one of them it resonated perfectly with Wilson’s principles of success.

Here’s my take on 10 Golden Principles of Successful Professional Service adopted and adapted from Fred Wilson.

1. Speed

Wilson shares:

First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it.

When my customers surveyed for the quality of my services the recurrent theme is timeliness. The following are common responses to a questions “What influenced your rating the most?”:

• Fast response
• Fast delivery
• Fast results

That’s by design and not by chance. When a customer calls me asking for help, last thing I can think of is telling him “I am avail in 2 weeks, works for you?” The only option for such answer is when I do not want to work for that customer.

When delivering my services I strive to get quick results, even the smallest but very quick. It builds trust, it shows the progress, it reduces the risk of delivering something a customer did not want in first place, it also gets me more confidence. The most important part is that it builds the end result naturally – no one waits impatiently until the end of service. The service results unfold as the service gets delivered.

Respond fast to a challenge, deliver fast results.

2. Instant Utility

Wilson shares:

What this means is the service is instantly useful to you. If you build a service and the user has to spend an [h]our configuring the service, setting it up, importing contacts, doing a lot of data entry, I don’t think people are going to – most people aren’t going to put up with that. The service has to be useful right out of the box.

Yeah, people want instant results, not hype. I mean… doh… Is not it obvious?! Well, it’s not. I witness enough cases when consultants deliver something that’s less than useful. If my service does not bring positive effect early on  chances it won’t be useful anyway. If so, then why bother in first place?

Keep your eye on the prize, end result is what matters, deliver results early.

3. Service is Media

The original principle is “Software is Media”. Wilson shares

…when people use it, they approach your software in the same way they would approach media.
…media companies have a voice. They have an attitude, and a style, and it’s unique. It’s different.
I think software has to feel that way. Your software has to have a personality. People have to feel like they’re consuming media when they consume your software.

I truly believe that professional service as a whole or a single consultant within the same group has to have a personal voice – he must be known for something that makes him to stand out, he must have a well established brand. Best when the brand is Credible, Compelling, and it Connects on personal emotional level.

The way I build my brand is to focus on my strengths and build my expertise.

I see a pattern when folks struggle to score high with customers and peers when they lack either deep knowledge or interpersonal skills.

What’s your brand? What’s your voice? You’re media. Hey, can I stick an AdSense Ad on your back?

4. Less is More

Wilson shares:

These services where you do one little thing, but you do it all the time, and it’s very reinforcing and you get a lot of utility out of it, and it’s quick, easy, and fast, I think tend to do very well and give you the platform to ultimately grow from there.

Al Ries in his epic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding says:

Customers want brands that are narrow.

I was testing this approach in consulting during last 6 years – I was focusing on extremely narrow set of services. I was rejecting aggressively anything unrelated. The outcome was that I was able to establish myself as a brand for those services inside the team and with the customers. It helped me to stay busy without spending time on the bench [which is good for consultant] – the pipeline was healthy and the backlog is solid. It still is and grows. I love another quote from the guy in the know. Gerald M. Weinberg puts it very succinctly in his Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully:

The wider your spread the thinner it gets.

5. Make it Programmable

Wilson shares:

…it’s important to make your application programmable, and make it possible that others can build on top of or connect to or add value to, in some way, your web application.

How do you make a consultant programmable? I follow two simple principles to achieve this goal:

1. Services are based on freely available information. Any service I deliver based on freely available information – nothing internal or best kept secret. I also communicate it to the customer – “I will be charging you for free stuff.” In fact I encourage the customer to do it himself – which is perfectly doable. My value here is the experience [interpretation] and timely delivery [immediacy]. So if the customer has plenty time and cares to build his expertise I am totally fine with not getting the gig. In most cases – the customer is happily willing to pay money since he needs timely results from the expert. Why it makes me programmable? Well, when the customer has all the know-how click away from him he is much smarter when he employs me, so he programs me to achieve high impact results even faster.
2. Services are stackable.  My services are very focused. In fact I have built a laser focused portfolio of services. It helps a customer to match my expertise to his needs much betters when he as the list of specific services at his disposal. He programs me to perform what’s needed at max while controlling the costs with well defined expectations. The ability to stack my services in flexible manner empowers the customer. It helps him to program me better.

Are you programmable?

6. Make it Personal

Wilson shares:

You also want to make your application infused with your users’ energy. The more of their data and their personality and energy that they can contribute to your application, the more ownership that they feel of it, and the more likely they are to advocate it and become, in effect, your marketing force..

When I work for a customer I am focusing more on facilitating him to solve the problems on his own. Even when I solve the problem on my own I make sure to transfer the knowledge so that next time he could do it on his own using my approach. If the customer succeeds it makes him feel great about himself and he immediately links it to me. One of my mentors once told me this:

On the team side, one thing I’ve found very helpful is to gently try to find something you can do to help your team members feel good about themselves; that in turn, will make them feel good about you.

Empowering a customer to solve problems makes him feel great about himself, and it makes him feel good about me. I tested it time and again. The outcome? Customers who feel good about me are my raving fans and they loyally recommend me to their friends. When I get a call from a prospect it’s not uncommon to hear “Alik, I got your contact info from a friend. How about to meet and discuss an issue we have with our system?”

7. RESTful

Wilson shares:

…What I mean by this is a bit of a bastardization. What I mean is that the entire application, everything in the application has a URL, and ideally, a very clean and comprehensible URL.
…Google will see that URL, will discover it, and so what it essentially allows is for the web, at large, to discover and get access to your application in very deep ways.

Long story short. Consultant must build his online identity to stay competitive in the services space. The simplest thing any consultant can do so is to create a LinkedIn profile and share insights on Twitter and on professional blog.

Are you RESTful?

8. Discoverability

Wilson shares:

…At its base level, for me, this means search engine optimization. You have to understand search engine optimization and you have to understand the rules; you’ve got to know how to do it. You have to build your application from the ground up to be discovered by Google, and optimized for Google.

If you care about security performance in you web applications built with Microsoft technologies you probably are going to run few searches for these keywords, something like this: asp.net security performance. Run this search and let me know if my name is not on the first page of search results, because if I am not there – I am serious trouble.

Are you discoverable? Do you appear on the first page of Google search results for your keywords?

9. Clean

Wilson shares:

Clean, to me, means that the application cannot be busy on the page. You need to be able to look at it and not be bothered with lots of stuff.

This perfectly applies to my deliverables. almost 100% of my services are backed by a final report documents that outline in details the service I was conducting. While writing my documents I focus extremely on readability and usefulness. If something does not fit into the categories I remove it. That way chances the recommendations documented in the report will be read and even implemented. I keep my docs clean and lean. The anti-pattern on the other side is creating heavy weight reports with ton of pages, massive tables, complex graphics, and prose. That’s proven to be a surefire way to keep such docs dusted on the shelf once they are delivered.

I can remember to work for a customer, a very smart customer. During the kick off meeting he told me: “Do not hand me heavy report in the end. Inspect the system and if everything is fine, just say so. No docs needed.” The other case was that I was limited by a customer to produce report 5 pages or less.

Customers want juice. Be clean and lean.

10. Playful

Wilson shares:

In any case, the ability to play in an application is really important. The game dynamic is what you can use to get users to do what you want.

What has playful has to do with professional services? I guess it’s about having fun. In his book Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully Weinberg writes:

"No Matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem."

In my gigs I deal with lots of different people – high ranks to system administrators and developers. I feel satisfied when I deliver the high quality results, but when on top of this I take away with me great interpersonal moments shared during the gig, that’s the best. I guess playful is about having fun and enjoying what you do and by that making others enjoy.

"Success comes from doing what you enjoy. If you don’t enjoy it, how can it be called success?" – David H. Maister, TRUE PROFESSIONALISM

Be playful, be enjoyable.

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Kindle Wireless 6"

Practice This – Get Results

1. Be fast – that’s the requirement to stay in the game.
2. Be useful – deliver quick wins in iterations.
3. Be media – broadcast your unique voice, build your brand.
4. Do less – narrow your brand.
5. Be programmable – relevance is king.
6. Make it personal – build your army of raving fans, the ultimate marketing force.
7. Be RESTful – get on Linkedin, Twitter, and personal blog. Share insights, not fluff.
8. Be discoverable – master SEO.
9. Be lean – eliminate waste, avoid distractions, invest less to achieve more.
10. Have fun.

My Related Posts

• Marketing For Consultants
• Consultant Masters His Workflow
• Beat The Competition – Offer Services On Demand
• 5 Stages of Successful Consulting Gig
• Consultant Overcomes Constraints and Reaches the Goal in 5 Steps
• 3 Basic Conditions For Successful Consulting Gig
• Notes From The IT Consultant Book

 
by Rick Freedman

I have been recently looking through the book The IT Consultant : A Commonsense Framework for Managing the Client Relationship. Below are the notes I have taken while flipping through the book.

Enjoy.

Consultants Critical Skills

• Advisory
• Technical
• Business
• Communication

Approach the Client

• Why is the client seeking advice?
• What’s the potential for Success?
• Engage with the client as a person.
• Don’t prescribe before diagnosing.
• Test your understanding.
• Profile the engagement.

Negotiate the Partnership

• Remember, Consulting is Ambiguous.
• Clarify expectations early.
• Take the emotions out of negotiations.
• Negotiate all elements of  the triple constraint.
• Document your agreement.

Visualize Success

• Vision generates momentum.
• Project vision presents clear goals.
• Project vision helps motivate teams.
• Project vision frames communications.
• Build client sponsorship around the vision.
• Communicate the vision throughout the client organization.

Understand Client’s Situation

• Better understanding equals better advice.
• Discovery process must be designed for each engagement.
• Base discovery process on enterprise IT model.
• Consultants have due diligence responsibilities.
• Create an As-Is model.

Design Solution Options

• IT design has standards of quality.
• Creativity can be learned.
• Utilize design techniques to stimulate creativity.
• Base design on enterprise IT model.
• Give the client options.
• Help the client select the best options.

Collaborate to Select Solutions

• Presentation of options is a critical deliverable.
• We advise, client decides.
• Decision process can’t be outsourced.
• Present delivery plans for each option.
• Document selected solution.
• Create a work project plan.

Deliver Business Results

• Deliver a complete solution.
• Document what you deliver.
• Deliver Secure systems.
• Deliver maintainable systems.
• Train users on your solutions.
• Test client satisfaction.
• Measure results against project vision.
• Document client acceptance.

Related Books

• The Consultant’s Calling: Bringing Who You Are to What You Do, New and Revised
• TRUE PROFESSIONALISM : The Courage to Care About Your People, Your Clients, and Your Career
• Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service

My Related Posts

• 5 Stages of Successful Consulting Gig
• Consultant Overcomes Constraints and Reaches the Goal in 5 Steps
• Marketing For Consultants

by CarbonNYC

Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants: Breakthrough Tactics for Winning Profitable Clients is a book by Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael W. McLaughlin I’d recommend anyone, not only consultants.

My biggest takeaways from the  book is a marketing mindset I should have as a consultant and also the prescriptive guidance on how to build my marketing strategy.

Here is my distillation. Read on…

Consultant’s Marketing Mindset

The authors of the book provide an attributes of guerilla marketing for consultants. These attributes helped me to get into the mindset of eternal demand creation for my services I offer as a consultant. And that’s the essence of any marketing – creating the demand.

• [Marketing]Is the business. This attribute reminds me that I am in constant contact with a customer which is just perfect situation to market my service, and that’s not by running the halls yelling “me! me!! me!!!”  rather by delivering first class services. Quietly. Results speak louder than blah blah blah.
• Focused message. This attribute reminds me I should be delivering narrow range of services . I deliver performance and security services. I am a SME [subject matter expert], not a generalist.
• Insight-based. This attribute reminds me that I must not keep IP [intellectual property] to myself rather readily share it with a customer [unless there is a violation of some policy or law]. Telling a customer “I will tell you how to do it after you sign a contract” is wrong. Better off to share the overall approach of the solution to customer’s problem generating demand for more detailed engagement.
• Build intellectual assets. This attribute reminds me to keep sharing the knowledge via my professional blog. This is the best investment I have made when it comes to marketing to customers, my managers, and potential employers.
• Build client relationships. This attribute reminds me to not only strive to full engagement with a customers but also to cherish the connections. These connections serve me well when it comes to market research, leads, and referrals.  Or a friendship.
• Enhance profit. This attribute reminds me that marketing is done to enhance my profits, not the philanthropy [at least at this stage of my career]. It helps me targeting my efforts to niches with more pain. The more pain, the more demand for SME’s.
• Reveal reality. This attribute reminds me I should share what I have witnessed – without beautifying or hiding parts of the reality. Clients are smart beasts, they spot fake in no time.
• Listen and serve. This attribute reminds me that marketing does not end by throwing stuff in the air – it reminds me I need to listen to reactions and act when there is a demand, even when no budget is allocated for it.
• One size fits none. This attribute reminds me that marketing, like life, is ongoing experiment – there is no rules. The only rule is “do what works, if it does not work – stop doing it.”
• Create markets. This attribute reminds me to be an entrepreneur, or inntrapreneur, or event soloreneur. It reminds me I cannot totally depend on someone else to create a market for my services.

Consultant Marketing Vision

The authors of the book offer extremely dense and prescriptive guidance on how to build a marketing strategy. I used it with my managers to get my message across. I think it clicked. Here is the guidance:

1. Sentence one explains the purpose of your marketing.
2. Sentence two explains how you achieve that purpose by describing the substantive benefits you provide to clients.
3. Sentence three describes your target markets(s).
4. Sentence four describes your niche.
5. Sentence five outlines the marketing weapons you will use.
6. Sentence six reveals the identity of your business.
7. Sentence seven provides your marketing budgets

Write your answers and see if your strategy sticks.

Practice This – Get Results

• Get Consultant’s Marketing mindset – focus your marketing efforts on high impact stuff.
• Follow 7 steps to build your marketing vision – if it sticks you’ll be just fine. If not, refine until it does.
• Read Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants: Breakthrough Tactics for Winning Profitable Clients – it’s loaded with insights from the guys who got results, not fluff.

My Related Posts

• Remarkable Marketing By Seth Godin
• From Part Time Aspiring Blogger To Marketing Top Gun
• Basic Instincts And Marketing

 
by ralphbijker

David Allen – the man behind the GTD brand and the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – offers the GTD Mastering Workflow seminar. Here is the promise:

What You’ll Learn

• Highly effective and simple techniques for handling email, paperwork and projects.
• How to implement specific action steps to make sure that you are aware of all of your commitments (to yourself and others)
• How to capture what has your attention, and place it into a system that you can trust – day in and day out
• How to clarify and organize your work, and reduce your sense of overwhelm in the process
• How to file paperwork, reading, emails, notes, and more – so that you can find it all again where and when you need it

Whoa! That’s exactly what I need! … Or do I?

As a field consultant I have developed my personal approaches when I was working for Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). In this post I am reflecting on my approach to the workflow and the techniques I am using.

Handling Email

There are 3 simple principles I follow:

• Zero Inbox policy. It prevents wasting time on scanning and rescanning your Inbox. More info: Keep Your Inbox Clean , Stay Focused And Productive – My 4 Simple Rules.
• Reduce places to look for emails. Looking for emails in fewer places saves time on jumping over different folders looking for the right email. I have three places where emails leave: Inbox, Projects folder, Archive. More info: Time Management: Boost Personal Performance With Caching Techniques
• Read email proactively, not reactively. Reading emails is distracting unless you do it intentionally. Most people read emails as it comes following some kind of notification. That’s reactive approach and it is distracting. Remove email notifications, stop distraction, read emails proactively. More info: Remove Distracting Email Notifications – All Of Them.

Managing My Attention and Commitments

To manage my attention and commitments I use the following 3 rules that focus me on stuff that matters, prioritization, and time management:

• Stuff that matters. First I identify stuff that matters, my life projects. It is related to work, family, personal development, etc. More info: Define Your Life projects – Design And Implementation
• Prioritization rules. I adopted Covey’s prioritization rules that are based on Urgent/Important attributes. Extremely simple and practical. More info: Prioritize What You Do – Steven Covey Way [The Way That Works]
• Time management. My approach for time management is simple – I treat it as a budget. Allocate time for stuff that matters upfront, then execute against the plan. More info: Time Is Not Money. Time Is Budget.

Organizing Work

Once I identified the stuff that matters and allocated time budget for it I use annual, monthly, weekly, and daily rituals to organize my work:

• Annual plan. Annual plan helps me identify my annual time budget.
• Monthly plan. Monthly plan helps me break down the time budget into weekly budget taking into account holidays and other potential leaves.
• Weekly plan. Weekly plan helps me allocating specific time budgets to specific life projects.
• Daily ritual. Daily ritual is basically executing against the plan.
• Weekly ritual. Weekly ritual helps me reflecting on what I have accomplished during the week and make proper adjustments to the week to come.

More info: Free eBook: Effective Time Management With MS Outlook 2007

Information Management

My information sources are mostly based on emails I receive and the RSS I am subscribed. The trick is filtering the info and funnel it to my personal topical knowledge base.

• RSS filters. I am subscribed to many feeds so scanning the feeds efficiently for new posts saves me time. More info: How to Use Outlook 2007 RSS To Effectively Aggregate And Distill Information
• Personal Knowledge Base [KB]. My personal knowledge base is based on Outlook folders. For each topic I have dedicated folder. Each time I encounter an info nugget I just move it into the folder for further reuse.
• Use keyboard. Using keyboard and mastering shortcuts is essential for fast performance. Using mouse is inefficient. More info: Email Processing On Steroids – Use Built In Shortcuts And Set Up Your Own.

Should I attend David’s workshop?

Related Books

• Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
• The 80/20 Individual: How to Build on the 20% of What You do Best
• Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used
• First Things First

by anniehp

Below is the list of books every consultant should read.

The books are not necessary focused on consulting – it is about marketing, customer service, leadership, personal effectiveness, writing, and more.

I have added posts inspired by each book for the reference.

Consultant or not, many of these books are great resource to help anyone to grow. It helped me, it will help you.

#	Book	My Posts
1	The IT Consultant : A Commonsense Framework for Managing the Client Relationship	<<in work in progress>>
2	The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding	Grow Quality – Not Quantity
3	The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You	Action and Timing Plan Ahead Or Plan Your Back Up Plan You Have Built A Team, Now What?
4	The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich	Apply 80/20 Principle – Focus On Stuff That Matters Team Of Top Performers Do Not Join Them. Beat Them. You Have Built A Team, Now What? Are You Achieving Your Business Goal? Grow Quality – Not Quantity Focus On Results, Avoid Workaholism – My 4 Simple Rules Want To Achieve Results? Push Yourself Out Of Comfort Zone
5	Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service	3 Things Customers Really Want The Power Of Saying “No” Experience Is The Most Valuable Product 3 Easy Steps To Become A Superhero Duck Or Eagle
6	Married to the Brand: Why Consumers Bond with Some Brands for Life	Ask Your Customers’ Friends – Your Growth Hides There 3 Simple Rules To Become The World’s Greatest Brand [Plus Self Check] Experience Is The Most Valuable Product
7	The Leadership Pill: The Missing Ingredient in Motivating People Today	One, Two , Three – Is This Manager For Me?
8	The Handbook of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: Inspiring Others to Achieve Results	Emotional Intelligence – Core Skills Emotional Intelligence – Higher Order Skills
9	The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal	4 Dimensions Of Personal Power Consultant Substitutes Leisure For Labour Do Not Join Them. Beat Them.
10	45 EFFECTIVE WAYS FOR HIRING SMART: How to Predict Winners and Losers in the Incredibly Expensive People-Reading Game	Basic Skills For Effective Public Speaking
11	The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking	Dale Carnegie’s Recipe For Effective Public Speaking
12	The Dream Manager	Time Management – Do You Control Your Life Or Life Controls You?
13	Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition	Is Consultant Career For Me? The Power Of Saying “No” Prioritize What You Do – Steven Covey Way [The Way That Works]
14	Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach	Leaders’ Work Is Becoming A Leader Actionable And Attainable For All?
15	Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method	On Writing – John Lennon, Gerald M. Weinberg, Me, You, And Outlook 2007
16	First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently	Do You Have The Dream Job? Consultant Arrives To Base Camp Consulting School Is Over, Time For Consulting Education
17	Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense, Low-Cost Approach to Management	Kaizen – Continuous Improvement The Japanese Way Gemba Kaizen – Three Step Approach For Kick 5 S’s Management
18	The One Minute Manager	Seven Characteristics Of High Performing Consultant
19	Kaizen: The Key To Japan’s Competitive Success	Kaizen – Think Process, Get Results. Personal Improvement – Kaizen Focus On Process
20	Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully	A Different One Million Dollar Mindset Basic Instincts And Marketing 3 Things Customers Really Want Consulting – What’s The Deal? Consultant Writes Proposals That Sell Powerful Consulting #5 Beat The Competition – Offer Services On Demand This Is How Consultant Loses Trust
21	The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)	The Courage To Quit
22	Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain	Build Credibility By Training Your Mind To Remember More
23	Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty: The Only Networking Book You’ll Ever Need	<<in work in progress>>
24	Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win More Customers, Clients, and Contracts	Consultant Writes Proposals That Sell
25	Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion	Want To Win? – Argue, Do Not Fight! What Aristotle Could Teach You About Consulting Effective Techniques To Handle Your Kid’s Temper Tantrum
26	The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be	Adopt 18/40/60 Rule And Stop Worrying About What They Think About You Improve Your Outcomes By Changing Your Responses Personal Development Books: The Structure Distilled
27	The 80/20 Individual: How to Build on the 20% of What You do Best	Apply 80/20 Principle – Focus On Stuff That Matters Stress Test Your New Idea For Success – The Checklist
28	Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success	Hollywood’s Project Management System
29	The Magic of Thinking Big	Successful Consultant Puts Positive Spin On Everything
30	What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful	You Are 95 And You Are Dying
31	Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life	Realize The Difference Between Activity And Productivity
32	The 48 Laws of Power	Powerful Consulting – #1 Powerful Consulting – #2 Powerful Consulting – #3 Powerful Consulting – #4 Powerful Consulting – #5
33	Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t	Powerful Consulting – #5
34	Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used	3 Basic Conditions For Successful Consulting Gig 5 Stages of Successful Consulting Gig
35	The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything	4 Things Mentors Do
36	Influencer: The Power to Change Anything	Secret Revealed: The Power to Change Anything
37	The Bates Method for Better Eyesight Without Glasses	Blogger, Improve Your Eyesight!
38	Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints	Consultant Overcomes Constraints and Reaches the Goal in 5 Steps Beat The Competition – Offer Services On Demand
39	Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants: Breakthrough Tactics for Winning Profitable Clients	<<in work in progress>>
40	TRUE PROFESSIONALISM : The Courage to Care About Your People, Your Clients, and Your Career	<<in work in progress>>
41	The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life	Follow The Three Laws of Performance
42	The Consultant’s Calling: Bringing Who You Are to What You Do, New and Revised	This Is How Consultant Loses Trust This Is How Consultant Fails
43	First Things First	Prioritize What You Do – Steven Covey Way [The Way That Works]

 
by skippyjon

It takes ages to build trust in consulting. It only takes a moment to lose it. I call it trust and Geoffrey M. Bellman calls it partnership in his book The Consultant’s Calling: Bringing Who You Are to What You Do, New and Revised

Bellman gives a good list of reasons why partnership [or trust] is easily lost. Here it is:

• The contracting is unclear.
• You work your own agenda.
• The fit is poor.
• The client has too much work and too little money.
• The project becomes less important to the client.
• You accept the work you would  not ordinarily do.
• You after the money.
• You catch the client’s "disease".
• You hold naïve positive assumptions.
• You pretend.

I wish I had this list long ago, before I learned it myself.

The contracting is unclear

The anti-pattern is very common. I get a call from sales guy telling me the gig is sealed so I can start working. I get onsite, I talk to a customer and realize that the expectations are somehow different from what was written in the contract. Worse, what’s written is quite blur.

Today, I mitigate such situations with prepared boilerplate SOW’s that I hand out to sales guys – “Hey, this is what I can do and this is how much it costs. Put your name on it and seal the deal.”

Question to ask:

• What’s the objective?
• Who’s affected?

You work your own agenda

There is always an agenda. But it should be in sync with the one of the customer’s. A consultant is a change agent. The ultimate goal is to change to better situation. If it serves your agenda – fine. If not, adjust your agenda but never the other way around.

The fit is poor

I was brought several times onsite but very quickly we all saw I am a poor fit. To mitigate such situations I tend to discuss the gigs with sales guys first and if it does not help I discuss the issues at hand with the customer in terms of objectives. Once objectives identified it is usually easy to understand if I can be of help or not.

Ask yourself:

• Am I the right guy for the job?

The client has too much work and too little money

Scoping usually reveals such situation. Recently I accepted few jobs with significantly reduced budget. The idea was to help the customer. The result was the opposite – unfinished results, unsatisfied expectations. I have learned my lesson again Gerald M. Weinberg taught me once in his book Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully:

"We can do it – and this is how much it will cost".

Ask yourself:

• How long it usually takes to complete similar gig?
• How much we usually charge for similar gig?

The project becomes less important to the client

You should sense it from the start. Who’s the real stakeholders? What’s the goal behind the goal? Have you tried to read between the lines? What folks say in a hallways? The other situation is re-org. Re-org is the surest way to lose original focus. Heard of re-org? Look for another gig.

You accept the work you would  not ordinarily do

I did it once recently. The reason I did is I just did not want to sit on the bench. Looking back, sitting on the bench would pay off more. I could not deliver to the standards I used to. The trust was damaged. Sitting on the bench wouldn’t hurt it.

You after the money

We are all after money. Your customers know that too. But do not be greedy. Customers talk each to other. It’s better that they talk that you deliver on the promise. “Hey, this guy charged me for Mercedes but delivered … a scooter.” or “The price was above the average it was worth it, no doubt.” Which one you choose?

You catch the client’s "disease"

It usually happens with Time&Material projects – you just go with the flow billing hours until they are exhausted. You catch all sort of diseases at customer’s along the way (organization diseases). That’s why I love fixed price gigs more – you are on mission, you get in, you hit your mark, and you get out of there for another gig. Adios.

You hold naïve positive assumptions

Having positive attitude is essential for success. Having positive assumptions is destructing. Having positive assumptions without solid ground for it will lead to failure and loss of trust. Being skeptic and constantly testing the progress toward the objective is what helped me to avoid pitiful situations at the end of the gig. Another approach is getting customer’s fingerprints on what’s going on – this way you know if your positive assumptions are true or not.

You pretend

We are all professionals. You can BS some all the time, you can BS all some time, you cannot BS everyone all the time. BS’ing is not your path, do not do it – do not pretend, just say “I am not in the know, but I know the guy who is. Here is his phone number.”

Practice This – Get Results

• Build your trust – it is the best marketing weapon I ever had.
• Guard the trust you have built – it’s too hard to build it, but it too easy to ruin it all.
• Read The Consultant’s Calling to become a better consultant.

My Related Posts

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by Knut Burmeister

Failure happens. I slip and I fall. It happens more than I want it to happen. I am on my quest to find out what are the early signs of a failure. Geoffrey M. Bellman shares good perspective on it in his book The Consultant’s Calling: Bringing Who You Are to What You Do, New and Revised.

Here is Bellman’s list:

• There are too few resources.
• There is too much training.
• There is a lack of leadership.
• Change is pursued as an event.
• Change is pursued in isolation.
• There is "flavor of the year" change.
• There are many unconnected changes.
• Meaning is lost in methods.

Let me share with you my personal view on each one of the above statements.

There are too few resources

There are two patterns of failure related to it.  One is when a customer allocates few resources but asks a consultant to deliver much more beyond it. The other pattern is when a consultant is over motivated and takes on a project that is under-budgeted. The result is always the same – frustrated consultant and unsatisfied customer. Here are few techniques I found useful to reduce the risk:

• Create boilerplate SOW’s – make sure sales folks sell what I can deliver. I can clearly remember a fiasco when I was assigned to a gig scoped to do something I had no clue.
• Work in iterations and share updated reports with the customer – get the customer onboard early in the gig [follow core principles – fail fast, turn chicken into pigs]. In the beginning I thought it is best to keep quite and just put the work done on the table in the end. It has proven to be completely wrong – I delivered great result nobody needed.
• Say No when asked to do more than agreed in the scope – stay on track. Saying yes can make friends in the beginning but in the end everyone will be disappointed by no results delivered at all due to overload – been there, not a great experience. You can say Yes to more work but make sure to trade it off for something else in the scope – stay within budget.

There is too much training

I love training. I guess everybody does. The more I observe or attend trainings I understand that most of people love it because it is for the sake of breaking the work routine and less for the sake of learning. Breaking the routine is fine, but that’s no-goal. The goal is getting smarter. I also observed that those who intend to get smarter after the training have hard times since most of the trainings I have observed are this-is-how-it-works style vs. this-is-what-you-should-be-doing style. I deliver training myself, I love doing it. What worked well so far is asking the audience to bring their own situations on the table and try solving it using the material that was learned through the training. Most of the time it works, but sometime I see some of my materials are theoretic – such materials gets improved by taking it to the field and testing it in practice.

• Is the trainer a practitioner – does he practice what he preaches?
• Is the training about how it works vs. what you should be doing?
• Are the practices covered in the training were successfully applied in the field?

There is a lack of leadership

Consultant is a change agent. Consultant uses his to influence without authority – it is essential critical skill but it is almost impossible to deliver first class service without a backup from the authorities. One of managers told me lately something along these lines “find decision maker who cares about it, if there is no such guy – cancel the project.”

• Who’s behind the initiative?
• Who’s against it?
• Is he a leader?
• Does he possess the power?
• WIIFM for the him?

Change is pursued as an event

Consultant usually is called when there is a crisis. It is the easiest way for consultant to build trust – save the day, save the customer. What I usually do is use such situation to explain that fixing specific problem won’t assure it won’t happen once more – the process is broken. I offer process improvements. Some customers get onboard, some not. Those who adopt process improvement they invest in their future, I usually leave such customers and rarely return to them – I like it. Thos customers that do not adopt the process improvements keep calling me to fix very same problems – I get bored, and usually leave such customers myself.

• Is there a long term plan for the initiative?
• Are there specific short term goals?
• Are there specific long term goals?

Change is pursued in isolation

Another variation of doing same work twice (three times, four times, etc.) is when a group at customer’s tries to make a change without proper communications outside the group. it is not common for me to work for a customer doing same work twice for different groups. Not that I am trying to support such work to increase the income – the contrary is true. I hate such work and I actively communicate such situation. The sad part is very often there are less than healthy competition among the groups and they just do not communicate. In the end there are two or more similar initiatives in the same organization. That surely invites antagonism and sentenced for a failure in the long run.

• Who’s affected in the organization by the initiative?
• Who might be interested/required to run similar initiative?
• What’s political map?

There is "flavor of the year" change

I fell in this trap few times. I was invited several times to support an initiative that just turned out to be “flavor of the year.” My enthusiasm was killed, no real results were achieved but the management reported a checkmark next to the action item up their chain. It quite easy to spot the “flavor if the year” initiative. I am using it to built a network of real supporters in the field. If I get support from people who care about the change chances it will survive after the checkmark is reported.

• Is it industry buzz?
• Is it a buzz inside the organization?
• Who might be seeing it as a real value besides the buzz?
• Does he have the power?
• WIIFM for the guy?

There are many unconnected changes

That’s another flavor of “Change is pursued in isolation.”

Meaning is lost in methods

Oh my – this is my favorite. I refrain saying 100% but surely the majority assume that change is a matter of tools or new techniques or methods. Fool with a tool is still a fool. Process matters. Tools support the process. Process and principles come first, then come the tools, techniques, and methods.

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Practice This – Get Results

• Make sure resources are allocated – if underbudgeted ask for it, reduce the scope, or call the whole thing off.
• Find the powerful guy behind it – get support from inside.
• Do not be fashionable – use proven practices and strive for actual results.
• Read The Consultant’s Calling – change or strengthen your view on consulting and how it can help you become a better you with less failures.

My Related Posts

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by kaibara87

To beat the competition you must not only be the best one in your category. You must be the best in the category that’s in demand. Information technology has high pace of change. So consultant’s services must change rapidly, he must offer high quality services on demand.

John Arthur Ricketts gives the following attribute to service on demand in his book Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints

• Responsive
• Variable
• Focused
• Resilient

Want to beat the competition? Consider adopting these attributes too.

Responsive Services

Rickets writes:

Responsive – The enterprise can sense and respond because it has an integrated view of its customer, employees, suppliers, business partners, and competitors.

To build my responsiveness for customers’ needs I put under my radar anything that can have significant impact on the customers. Here are few examples:

• Customer’s industry or vertical’s news. For example, If it finance sector then new regulations can lead to services opportunities.
• Technology updates related to the customer’s environment. Knowing well customer’s current situation and tech trends can support a consultant in helping a customer to build a roadmap for tech refresh and potentially getting a gig.
• Personal preferences updates. For example, a customer might be a football fan. Being updated regarding related news can help striking another engaging conversation that in the end can lead to discussing a business.
• Anticipated changes at customer’s. Collect customer’s information beyond the scope of your current project or assignment. This would help you both aligning yourself better to the organization needs and potentially would create a leads for possible future gigs.

Variable Services

Rickets writes

Variable – The enterprise can alter its productivity, costs, marketing, and finances as conditions change because it has flexible processes and resource.

The main cost for consultant is related to time. Billable time and non-billable time. Reducing non-billable time related to non-productive work reduces cost dramatically!! But remember! Training and self recreation IS productive work although it is non-billable. That means you have to have clear processes and procedures to accomplish your tasks faster without spending time for adminstrativa, commuting, or other non-productive work. Here are few approaches I use to reduce non-productive work:

• Have marketing one page glossies to be sent or left behind for potential prospects.
• Have baseline SOW’s to be quickly customized as needed.
• Have delivery kits that guide the deliver processes.
• Have the list of common problems and solutions.

Focused Services

Rickets writes:

Focused – The enterprise concentrates on its core competencies while using strategic business partners to handle its noncore tasks.

Focusing on my strengths helps me build my expertise. The better expert I become the faster I can produce a quality results. Surveying customer proves it time and again, they keep responding that timely quality response is what they value the most. As Gerald M. Weinberg put it in his epic book Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully:

The wider your spread the thinner it gets.”

Resilient Services

Rickets writes:

Resilient – The enterprise rapidly handles changes and deals with threats because it has a flexible operating environment.

I adopted this approach following Mark Twain advice:

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”

It helped me reinvent myself several times. Being a consultant I was focusing on several areas:security, performance, and solution architecture to mention a few. I am having fun, I am fully utilized, and I am working on high impact challenges. I was reacting to market demand proactively by building my skills upfront. Such resilience helped me staying in the game. To effectively build myself for the next challenge without hurting my utilization and work/life balance I apply the following techniques:

• Proactively allocate time for training. Give it high priority as it was your most valuable customer. Make sure any time collisions are resolved the way that does not hurt your training roadmap.
• Know the trends. Read well recognized blogs and other online resources. Identify the trends.
• Build your network. Connect personally with those in the know. Do not abuse the connection. Use it only for critical decision making. Ask really good questions – make the other guy want you to ask those questions in the future.
• Practice. Build your expertise by getting your feet wet and your hands dirty – there is no other way around, you must know it first hand.

Practice This – Get Results

• Know what’s important to the customer or what can have an impact it his business – be responsive.
• Cut fat, reduce costs by being more effective with less – be variable.
• Invest in your strengths, build your deep dive skills – be focused.
• Build yourself for the next challenge now – be resilient.
• Read Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints – beat the competition.

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by nDevilTV

In most cases when you follow the rules or do it by the book you succeed. So, what are the rules for conducting successful consulting gig? Got book?

I am on continuous hunt after good consulting books .Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used by Peter Block seems like one of best of breed. It is chocked with prescriptive guidance that can perfectly serve both aspiring and seasoned consultants. My favorite part is his description of 5 stages for each consulting gig: [1] Entry and Contracting, [2] Discovery and Dialogue, [3] Feedback and Decision to Act, [4] Engagement and Implementation, [5] Extension, Recycle or Termination.

Getting or giving consultation? Read on.

Phase 1: Entry and Contracting

Block writes:

It includes setting up the first meetings as well as exploring what the problem is, whether the consultant is the right person to work on this issue, what the client’s expectations are, and how to get started.

Nothing can be more frustrating as trying to solve wrong problem or being the wrong guy. In fact, I am involved with two related gigs. With one I am the wrong guy, and the other – the customer still have not figured out what he wants to do with me after he signed the contract. I confess – it all sucks. On less emotional and more practical note here is another angle – my brand gets seriously hurt, customer satisfaction goes down, the trust gets broken, the deliverable is hardly to hit the deadlines, future gigs won’t come from such customer.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Druker

Phase 2: Discovery and Dialogue

Block writes:

The questions here for the consultant are: Who is going to be involved in defining the problem? What methods will be used? What kind of data should be collected? and How long will it take?

This step requires intelligence skills – here you need to identify the main players and their WIIFM. Mobilize your skills to understand how many of the players will benefit from potential solution and how many will actually hurt. With consulting it’s extremely rare situation when everybody’s happy. If you solve a problem it means that something or someone gets ax – otherwise why would they call you onsite? Identify the strongest player and play by his rules.

Phase 3: Feedback and the Decision to Act

Block writes:

This phase is really what many people call planning. It includes setting ultimate goals for the project and selecting the best action steps or changes.

My father always liked to say that properly stated problem definition is half of the solution [Damn it! I miss you so much, Papa]. That is why in my SOW’s I always allocate time for scoping the problem – it both helps to focus on high ROI activities and prevents the scope runaway during the engagement implementation.

Phase 4: Engagement and Implementation

Block writes:

In many cases the implementation may fall entirely on the line organization. For larger change efforts, the consultant may be deeply involved.

Getting deeply involved is my favorite part with consulting. But watch out, keep away from making the decisions on customer’s behalf. At some point a customer may want to move the responsibility of making decision to a consultant. Either due to highest trust that was established or just because the customer hates making decisions. It happens too. Offer tools to make a decision, not the decision. It’s a slippery road, do not slip – you might fall.

Phase 5: Extension, Recycle, or Termination

Block writes:

There are many options for ending the relationship, and terminations should be considered a legitimate and important part of the consultation. If done well, it can provide an important learning experience for the client and the consultant and also keep the door open for future work with the organization.

The deliverable is delivered, the gig is wrapped and the customer is happy. Heaven. It is the best time to offer your services for problems identified during the gig implementation. Market it, sell it, close it! You’d never have a better chance to promote your services.

The gig went all wrong? Terminate it as it was success – with a smile. Keep doors open, never slam it. You might get another chance in the future with the customer – all the investment you made onsite worth something, eh? Customer understands it too.

Practice This – Get Results

• Ask the right questions – identify key personas and key objectives.
• Set scope – focus on high ROI, guard yourself from scope runaways.
• Practice emotional intelligence [EQ] – it is powerful weapon, but watch out, it is explosive.
• Read Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used – learn the rules, play by the rules, succeed.

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by Philo Nordlund

Customers want immediate results. That is the name of the game – fast results. If you cannot offer fast results you are out of the game.

Have you asked yourself what bogs you down? What are the constraints that hold you back from producing great results fast?

I have few ideas after reading a book by John Arthur Ricketts Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. Rickets applies the Theory of Constraints [TOC] presented by Goldratt in his book The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement to Consulting Practice.

Here are 5 core steps  for applying TOC in Consulting Practice according to Rickets:

1. Figure out where the constraints are
2. Utilize the constraint to its fullest extent
3. Make sure that non-constraints keep the constraint busy
4. Improve productivity of the constraint
5. Repeat the previous steps

Constraints

The first step is figuring out what your constraints are. As a consultant I identify these three core constraints:

• My managers.
• The sales force.
• Myself.

Take Your Manager To The Max

What’s your managers purpose? To me it seems pretty simple, here is what manager should do:

• Set goals for me.
• Remove obstacles that are out of your control.

Instead, many times  managers do quite the opposite:

• Set unrealistic goals.
• Add more obstacles.

In this case it becomes a serious constraint for a consultant in achieving his goals.

Here is what one can do in order to utilize the constraint to its fullest:

• Set achievable goals. ”Sir, I understand you want to hit your mark, but I am only human. Here are some more realistic numbers.”
• Escalate obstacles that are out of your control and ask to remove it. ”Call that customer and force him to attend the meeting, you do not want to send him a bill full of ”Trying to set a meeting”, aren’t you?”
• Set priorities (utilization, satisfaction, revenue, readiness, etc.).“That blogging thing is really important, but please get me off of it so I can successfully wrap up my current gig.”

Take The Sales Forces To The Max

Sales people generally do two things – they forecast the sales and sell. When they sell, a consultant has a job, when they don’t sell the consultant sits on the bench [bad thing!]. So in short there are two constraints that sales folks pose to a consultant:

• Sell stuff consultant can hardly deliver [blur contracts, contracts that does not include consultant’s expertise].
• No sales.

Following are proven practices that helped me to utilize the constraint to the max:

• Help salesman to generate backlog for you:
  • Determine your value prop. What do you put on the table? What customers value you the most for? If you have hard times to quickly answer these questions you have serious and immediate problem to solve.
  • Generate related SOW’lets. SOW’let – SOW skeleton that outlines your activities and deliverables, it is the building block for a salesman. It should prevent creating blur contracts and SOW’s that you have no clue how to deliver.
• Help salesman generate more backlog for you
  • Send him related SOW’let when opportunity in the sight. Consultant is a field guy and he sees opportunities first hand. Waste no time.

Take Yourself To The Max

You are your biggest obstacle and constraint. Period.

Here are techniques that help me unleash myself:

• Create delivery kits to make the process straightforward:
  • Questionnaire to collect the data.
  • Questionnaire to analyze the data.
  • Common issues list.
  • Ready to use list for how-to’s that show how to solve the common issues.
• Create your personal KB  [knowledge base]
  • Do not just rely on Desktop search and Google – it brings too much noise and wastes time.
  • Make it extremely easy and fast to access. Make sure you get what you want in less clicks (How to Use Outlook 2007 RSS To Effectively Aggregate And Distill Information, Consume patterns&practices Guidance Explorer Via RSS Using Outlook 2007)
• Mater time management
  • Free eBook: Effective Time Management With MS Outlook 2007
• Follow rigid Prioritization rules
  • Use Covey’s prioritization quadrants

Practice This – Get Results

• Identify your constraints – know what holds you back
• Utilize your constraints to the max – unleash yourself and break the limits
• Read The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement and Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints – the foundations of Theory Constraints and how to apply it in practice.

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