Saturday 14 February 2009

What does a Consultant DO?

My views are purely the outcome of my experience. Now this is something very interesting. I'm recently into "web-development-consulting''. So to comment upon, I would begin with saying, that consulting is an art where the power of communication, ideas, intellect and know-how of the concerned market are together driven towards the achievement of the ultimate requirement of the client, adding value to our service. Here, understanding the client's requirement is very important. The skills demanded by the position of being a consultant is tremendous but these skills alone wont help. Its like "I have a phone but no one to talk to". Yes I mean it right... 'being client-centric' is essential at every instance being a consultant. The bottom line says, "Being a consultant, is being client-centric".

But then, is that so very easy as we think? I wont comment on that, as it depends on the experience and expertise level of various tycoons of consulting industry, no matter in what. In every aspect of consulting, client plays the most important role. For the purpose of knowing the needs and core requirements of the client, we need to undergo a vast thought-process, we need to have an in-depth insight about the business goals of the client, how does it function, the circle of all the vendors with whom they work with, the vendor policies, outsourcing details, etc. The more clear and precise we have the information with us, the more we have the ideas "ready-to-sell". This comes not with a great liberation but a lot of sacrifice. But its not necessary, all the time that we need to know these since it also depends on the policies of the companies, if they would disclose these critcal information. So we need to be wise enough to understand and act as per the circumstances based on facts. There are 'n' number of factors which influences 'consulting', which gives you 'n' number of options.

When in a meeting for instance, with the client, nothing but a scribbler will do a great help. This helps you to jolt down the critical points and minute details that you may miss out while making some of the most critical decisions. I do very precisely remember a phrase told to us by my high school principal. He'd said, "A faint ink is much better than a sharp memory". So travelling back from the sweet memory lane and re-learning some school days lesson, the punch line here says rather screams with a pinch of salt to convey the message. The points that we write down when in a meeting helps us not to miss out any minute details that is being conveyed to us by the client, helping us to get to the root level of the requirement and thus better decisions. Does the job of a consultant finishes here? I definitely need some further insight into the same.