Onsite Seminar
Working with the Business:
Consulting Skills for Data and IT Professionals
Being right isn’t enough. One of the major challenges – often the greatest challenge – is engaging the client: understanding their requirements, winning their support, and meeting their expectations. Yet most IT professionals give far less attention to these consulting skills than they give to their technical expertise. If you are an experienced professional who has not previously studied consulting skills, this workshop is likely to be more valuable in improving your effectiveness than any technical course.
In this highly-interactive workshop, Graeme Simsion shares principles, techniques, and tips learned from 25 years of managing an internal data management function, establishing and managing a successful consultancy and working as an independent consultant. He uses a combination of formal material, stories, lectures, group exercises and case studies to share ideas and techniques that you will use throughout your professional life.
Objectives
- A deeper understanding of consulting relationships – and how to make them work
- Practical techniques for establishing expectations – checklists and questions
- A set of practices to keep assignments on track
- Techniques for dealing with problems and difficult clients
- Practical approaches to writing reports and delivering presentations
Course Outline
Understanding consulting
The title or role of “consultant” brings with it a specific set of challenges and expectations. We look at the nature and psychology of consulting, and identify behaviors that lead to successful assignments.
- The consultant role – how you’re perceived, what is expected
- Why consulting assignments fail – and what to do about it
- Working in a consulting team
- Professional behavior – and common mistakes that hurt your credibility
Setting expectations
The widely-accepted key to effective consulting is “managing expectations”. This means establishing mutual expectations and keeping them up to date, so that at every stage of the assignment both client and consultant can be confident in a successful outcome. We look at a range of techniques for understanding and validating expectations.
- Selling consulting services: how the professionals do it
- Really understanding clients and their needs
- Establishing expectations – checklists and frameworks
- Negotiating achievable outcomes – and negotiating in general
- Pulling it together in a consulting plan
Delivering services
We look at the day-to-day practices of good consultancy needed to monitor expectations and deliver against them, and to deal with problems. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own problems for discussion.
- Effective consulting practices: habits that distinguish the professional
- Staying on track – and managing change
- Gathering data and formulating solutions
- Working with others: client staff, your own team, external consultancies
- Common problems – and practical solutions
- Maintaining integrity – while keeping the stakeholders happy
- Dealing with difficult people
Deliverables and closure
Many consulting assignments stay on track until close to the end – and then they stumble on as reports are written and re-written, deliverables await final client sign-off, and goodwill (and the prospect of further work) diminishes. This final session looks at getting closure on time and on budget and laying a base for a continuing relationship. Particular attention is given to preparation of verbal and written reports, a task that technical people often find particularly frustrating.
- Writing reports that get accepted - and acted upon
- Designing and delivering effective presentations
- Getting closure on the deliverables
- Turning experience into capability: learning from assignments
- Maintaining the client relationship beyond the completion date
Duration
2 days
Course Format
Lecture, group discussion and exercises
Instructor
Graeme Simsion
To request a quote for this in-house seminar
Please call (973)379-7212 or email info@debtechint.com
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