Welcome
Welcome to the Foresight Newsletter, a free monthly publication of Prevoyance Group Inc. This newsletter shares tips for high performance IT organizations and observations that we hope will prove informative and enjoyable.
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Contents
CONTENTS
Foresight is published by the Prevoyance Group, and this month contains four sections:
Work
Life
Heard in the Hallways
Travels with Patrick
Work
One of the management fads of the late 1980’s was to tag every employee as a “consultant.” What were once garbage men were now “Waste management and disposal consultants,” and your local burger jockey became a “Processed Beef Customer Service Consultant.” Thankfully this trend has become a bit more rational, although on the professional services front, especially in the IT arena, we are assaulted by a variety of self-designated consultants on a daily basis.
Does a moniker actually matter, or has the increasingly cold weather caused this newsletter to descend into semantic games? While the word itself may not matter, the perception in the buyer’s eyes as well as the person who is hired as a “consultant” can make or break a relationship. Before we can delve into the nuances of the effect of perception on a business relationship, let’s examine what we mean by “consultant.”
In the purest sense of the word, a consultant provides council, and is an adviser more than a doer or implementer. Perhaps the perfect example is the psychiatrist. They develop advice and council based on “client interviews:” the traditional couch session. The psychiatrist may suggest nebulous personality changes to a client, or may recommend detailed activities to cope with their current situation, but the psychiatrist never actually implements those changes. I am not aware of any practicing psychiatrist who will inject themselves directly into a patient’s life and attempt to change their situation, nor would it be particularly effective.
Where this applies to business relationships is on the expectation of council versus implementation. While the consultant title has a certain level of prestige attached to it, as well as associated baggage, it is too often applied to those hired in an implementation capacity. This can become dangerous when the so-called consultant expects or acts as if they should be providing council rather than solely implementation services and vice versa. If you hire an expert to solve a particularly difficult implementation problem, and he or she instead runs amuck giving unsolicited advice rather than fixing the relevant problem, neither the “consultant” nor the person that hired them will be happy with the relationship. Unnecessary time may be spent analyzing or pontificating rather than implementing, if the perception gap is not closed at the outset of the relationship.
While sweeping changes of titles and development of new appellations is stuff that only an HR executive can find exciting, clarifying the expectations as to advising versus implementing for any temporary resource should be a key practice in your organization. Whether hiring a “Network Equipment Installation Consultant” or a C-level strategy consultant, both parties will get the maximum benefit from the transaction when they know what percentage of their time is expected to be spent providing advice, and what percentage is to be spent doing hands-on implementation.
Life
Fall is one of my favorite seasons. While an ever dwindling amount of sunlight can be depressing, and crisp evenings bring promises of dropping temperatures and swirling snows, Fall brings with it a certain seriousness of purpose that has always appealed to me. Children return to school while squirrels and other animals busy themselves with preparations for the Winter. Long-anticipated summer vacations are now pleasant memories, and for the first time we begin to consider the approaching New Year and what we would like to accomplish. Fall is the intersection between hopes for the future, and time still remaining on the calendar to realize today’s dreams.
Heard in the Hallways
The phone has become such a ubiquitous piece of our existence that we occasionally forget that on the other end of the handset is an environment that may be completely different than ours. From the sound of a flushing toilet on a conference call, to babies’ cries emanating from a speakerphone in an executive conference, it continues to amaze me how decorum falls through the cracks when a telephone line separates two parties. While the phone may provide some element of anonymity, more than a few reputations have been soiled due to a comment in poor taste, or use of the phone in, shall we say, unorthodox places.
Travels with Patrick
I generally keep fairly standard working hours, getting up at a reasonable hour each morning, heading to the office, and then heading home for dinner. Occasionally however, I find myself traveling at an odd hour to get to a client site or when taking a long road trip. While often bleary eyed and somewhat tired, I am always amazed at what a different world exists outside of normal business hours.
On a recent trip to Washington, DC around 3AM, I could count the number of passenger cars on one hand through the normally crowded New York City corridor, the road instead a mass of hulking eighteen wheelers rapidly moving goods from one point to another. The city and roads have an eerie quiet about them, while the monsters of commerce fly through the uncongested arteries of commerce. A massive truck fire only added to the strange and otherworldly effect of the trip, my car passing the burning hulk in the pre-dawn blackness before police or fire crews arrived on the scene, the driver looking bewildered on the side of the road.