Tips That Will Make You A Great Consultant (1/3)
You may want to join consulting industry or already in a consulting industry. What qualities or habits that the top performing consultants have? I joined consulting industry since my first internship, and have been working with consultants all the time. Here are the qualities or habits I have spotted in the top performers. And I had learnt A LOT from them. Hope the practical tips I shared with you can help you grow from a good consultant to a GREAT consultant.
Tip 1 Keep An Excel To-do List
There are really a lot of things to do, beyond what you can remember without notes. And the tasks might not come from one source. And the to-do list keeps growing. Some consultants keep to-do list in paper but eventually switched to computer. Some consultants like me keep the to-do list in text document but later on I realize I cannot do much analysis to my tasks in word/text. Analysis include task category, task completion date (to report to the project manager), priority (which one to work on first), action taken, result, status (pending on me or client), projected finish date. Further analysis include how many tasks are completed in last week. Eventually, I switch my to-do list to Excel which provides me all these analysis in a simple way. After I switch it to excel, I started noticing (well, spot light effect :P) a lot of my consultants colleagues are using excel to keep track of the tasks already. Now I even keep my personal tasks, e.g., pay phone bill, in excel. I wish I could have used excel to keep my To-Do list earlier.
Tip 2 Document and Share Agreements That have been Established
A super good practice I have learnt is to document down the decisions or agreements made by clients and share with the project. Let me give you an example and you will know how important it is. In the middle of the project, client A says sorry I just realized we also want financial analysis to be in place. Consultant B usually will say it is out of the scope (else, the client A is too lucky). Of course client A won’t be happy and insist his want. In this time, if the previous agreements were documented down and shared with client A, i.e., the project will not cater for financial analysis for client A, then it is client A’s responsibility that he forgets to include this requirement in the first place. Client A can raise change request through project management office. If there is no documentation of the agreement, consultant B is going to suffer, e.g., consultant B need to work additional hours to do financial analysis, he will be questioned by the project manager why it takes so long for him to complete his job, project might get delayed because of this, etc. How often does clients change mind, have new requirement, etc? Every hour. Is it fun to have changes? Not at all. Is it fun to work over time every day? Definitely not. So lock the agreement in black and white and share them everyone in the project.
Tip 3 Say These Two Things When You are not Sure
Scenario One:
Client: When is the project go live date? You: (if you don’t know or not sure whether it is good to tell client) I am not the best person to answer this. I will check with the project manager who has the full view of the project and get back to you.
Scenario Two:
Client: can we have this in place? You: (if you don’t know or not sure) I need to check with other consultants to see whether there is impact to other parts of the project before I commit to this.
These are the two most useful sentences I have found. For project related uncertain issue, go to project manager. For consultancy related matters, go to other consultant for impact analysis. If you have a third useful sentence, do let me know! LOL. The principle here is avoiding saying I DON’T KNOW. I realized it is very unprofessional. Come on, if you don’t know, what do they pay you for? At lease use one of the two sentences above. It demonstrates that you are looking for solutions for the client’s requirement from multiple points of view and you know the proper way of handling it.
How do you find the tips? Aren’t they very practical? I will share with you more tips in the next post. I will also share with you the difficult situations I have met and seen in this blog. Welcome any comments!
