How I broke the golden rule of being a consultant
I work as a consultant; selling my technical expertise to internal and external clients. This type of work needs both technical expertise but also a client focus. Recently, I broke the golden rule of consulting… I made my client look bad in front of their client.
Consulting is a relationship based business
Consulting is about lending your technical domain expertise and credibility to someone who doesn’t come from that world. The client hires you to help articulate your skills and experience as it applies to their project. As they are not the expert, they are placing their trust in you.
This trust is valuable but also fragile. A big part of being a good consultant is nurturing and maintaining that trust. A good consultant and client relationship needs that trust to be an effective team so the project can be achieved.
Your client’s project depends on your input to support the project. Usually, the client has a client they report to. This head client is removed from the practical details and is relying on your client to deliver to time and budget — to see progress in other words.
The golden rule is about making sure you deliver for your client so they can deliver for theirs.
How I broke the golden rule
On a weekly progress call, my client, Jane (names changed to protect confidentiality), mentioned she needed additional help to write a technical specification. This was needed to procure a supplier.
On my team is Paul, an expert in technical area in question. I volunteered Paul for the role and Jane was happy to have the help. As it was an open team meeting, I didn’t explore much about the work as I figured I would delegate that to Paul.
Contacting Paul, I gave him a quick overview and asked him to get in touch with Jane. Paul confirmed he would do so as soon as possible. Having worked with Paul for a few years, I’ve always found him highly dependable and assumed he’d contact Jane directly.
Well, the next progress meeting came around and Jane was annoyed. Not angry — she’s not the type — but annoyed. It turns out Paul hadn’t gotten in touch and, a week later, Jane didn’t have any progress to show her client. She had promised her client that the situation was in hand; however, without being able to demonstrate progress, she looked bad in front of her client and received adverse comment for it.
So, by not having progress to show Jane to show her client, the Golden Rule had been broken.
What I did wrong
In hindsight, I made several classic project management mistakes.
1. I didn’t confirm deadline at the initial meeting — this meant I didn’t realise how urgent the deliverable was, meaning I failed to transmit to Paul that same sense of urgency.
2. I got busy the following week and trusted Paul would contact Jane. What I didn’t appreciate was Paul was under other pressures — he was diverted by management above me onto their priorities.
3. Jane was facing serious time pressures of her own; this meant it slipped from her mind because she also thought the deliverable was being dealt with.
Falling between the cracks, the deliverable was forgotten about until Jane’s client asked for an update. As she couldn’t give a status update, this looked bad in front of her client. And hence she was annoyed.
How I got things back on track
What did I do to try and recover the situation? Well, what I should have done in the first place.
1. I chaired a meeting with Paul and Jane to drill down into some detail about the technical specification — enough key headings for Paul to work with so he could go way and crunch through the details (which he loves)
2. I also asked Jane if she knew of anyone who may have had a similar specification for the geographic area the work was to be done in. Each country does things slightly differently and I didn’t want to waste any unnecessary time localising Paul’s work if he could do that himself at the same time as writing the specification
3. I also took the time to ensure certain things were excluded — for example, writing the Invitation to Tender wouldn’t be Paul or mine’s cup of tea, so Jane would be better getting someone else to help with procurement. This was good in aligning expectations and preventing further gaps.
In the end, the recovery plan was successful. Paul was able to lean on his expertise to start pulling the specification together to an agreed timeline. Jane was able to attend the next progress meeting with the client and could show progress and I made sure that, even though I was on a remote client site, I checked in with Paul on progress.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, this was a small mistake that had temporary, if uncomfortable, consequences. I mishandled the situation initially and let Jane down. Accepting responsibility for that mistake involved eating humble pie. Even experts get things wrong from time to time.
Fundamentally, being a consultant depends on building and maintaining trustful relationships. That means being user friendly i.e. accepting responsibility and working to resolve the issues. This makes you someone your client can rely on when the chips are down, even if you are to blame!
Enda Casey is an engineer working mostly in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He likes to write about infrastructure and give a ‘behind the scenes’ look at how it comes into being.
