When I started Beta Thoughts one of the very first categories I had created was consulting. Idea was to share some of the thoughts, best practices etc. that I have gained over the years. During the last few years I have been to many places, got to be part of exciting teams, different work environments etc. One thing that has remained constant is two golden rules that were told to me by Michael Chio, an excellent consultant on my very first consulting gig in Bay Area. I have lost touch with him over the years but I still remember his golden advice. Here they are

Never Say No - Never say a out right no to what is asked from you. Besides isn’t it true that given enough time and effort most of things can be done. Even in cases where you know that this task cannot be done, ask more questions to about the task, get more clarifications of the variables of the problem being asked. It may be the case that you haven’t understood the problem. If still you think the answer is no give enough simple and clear reasons why the task can not be done.

Do not panic - this might be written on the front page of Hitch Hiker’s guide to galaxy but it is also true in consulting world. You might have blown away the last week’s effort but do not I repeat do not panic. Your panic situation will send an exponentially higher signal to the client. There is nothing worse than a consultant panicking in front of a client. Analyze the reasons it happened and what you need to do to resolve this.

I have added a third rule to this

Communicate - Humans like to talk. It is very important that you are talking about your progress with your client. You might be doing a yeoman’s job but without communication it might not be as worthful. It doesn’t help to just sit there and do your job one needs to talk to peers and higher ups.

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I think I am going to be reading Sadgopan’s blog more and more. He pointed to an article in CIO magazine about an IT project faliure. Now I work as a consultant who implements IT systems to automate business processes. Studying and practicing good project implementation practices is something which I have deep interest in. The article sums it well at the end and every business stake holder should learn it by heart that

There is big leverage between IT and the business processes when you deal with a large supply chain,” he says. “Just looking at contingency planning from an IT point of view would be a big mistake. It has to be looked at from an integrated view of IT processes and the business.

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There are times when I think about going back to school get masters. Often I have thought if I go back what would I be specializing in? Now being a geek at heart I can’t imagine myself getting into a totally tangential field. Being a consultant I have always been involved with high pressure projects and you have to deliver at the right time with the right cost. If you don’t you are out of the game quickly. Wise men of the consulting would agree with me that even with the best intentions sometimes the things don’t go the way you never wanted them to go. So I thought it would nice to go to a school where you go thru these kind of scenarios in a rapid manner. So instead of learning by experience which is a great thing but takes longer time you will have some idea what you are getting into and what to expect. It seems world thinks the same. Atleast researchers at the IBM Alamden Research Center. Infoworld is carrying a story starting a curricullum on services sciences. Quote from the article

The idea behind services science is to develop a curriculum focused on the study of the services industry, much in the same way that computer science gradually evolved as an independent field of study during the mid-20th century.

This had to happen. I am glad it is happening. On a separate note a somewhat related book on this topic is “Aligning the Stars”. An enjoyable read with pragmatic advice.

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As I said earlier for the corporate world Roller type java blogs make a lot more sense. Sun’s decision to use Roller also cemented these thoughts. Finally I installed Roller 0.9.8 at my present client and boy that was a breeze of an install. While it can not be compared to the 5-minute install of Wordpress but for a multi-user blogging application deployed on a solid J2EE based scalable architecture it is great. It took me about 40-55 minutes to install excluding the download time for various components. Install was in a Windows environment. The only place where I stopped to think was Search Engine index settings. I had to make Tomcat service run as a named user account instead of the default LocalSystem Account.Overall I am quite happy.

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I have been a consultant for many years now. It has taken me to many new places, to many clients almost across complete US. While on the road experiences are bound to happen. Some good and some not so good. I always wanted to write them but never had the put them somewhere in a structured manner. Now with the medium of weblogs, I have got just what I was looking for. Here I would try to put my unstructured train of thoughts on consulting. Here is the first post in the consulting category.

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