To be an effective consultant, you don’t have to know everything. You just have to know one more thing than the person you are helping.
To be an effective consultant, you don’t have to know everything. You just have to know one more thing than the person you are helping.
Examples please! Sounds like you have some stories to tell.
It also helps to be willing to take the political heat for decisions that need to be made, but that the customer themselves can’t or won’t make.
My pithy observation seems much less profound when I go into details with examples, but since you ask…
I originally had this flash of insight about a year ago, and unfortunately I do not remember the specific trigger for it. But I’ve always been self-conscious about my lack of “hard core” IT expertise, and this truism has helped me make peace with my failings.
The specific situation which inspired my post happened the night before that post. My MIL called my cell number, so I handed the phone to my husband; I just assumed she’d meant to call him and tried me when he didn’t pick up. Au contraire! She had a computer problem, so she needed me.
Remember just a second ago, I bemoaned by IT skillz? Well, even though they give me an inferiority complex at work, they make me the go-to gal for anything dealing with computers in our family. So I don’t know much: but I know one more thing and that makes me a hero to them.
(In this case, she’d had an external drive attached when the computer first started up, and it was hung on the set-up screen to give her the option to boot from the other device. I told her to restart it manually without the external drive attached, and everything worked fine!)