How to be a good consultant

I often like to read the biography of those people who had improved our world leveraging their knowledge to science, and making a fair use of it. There's a lot to learn from great people like Marie Curie, Darwin, Newton and many others. I’m convinced that everything we learn can be applied to our life to make it better.
Michael Faraday was one of these great men, in my opinion.

Reading the biography of Michael Faraday, I read that he applied six basic principles to his scientific discipline all the time, that he learned from a book by Isaac Watts titled "The Improvement of the Mind", that Faraday read when he was fourteen.
These six principles are:

1. Take always with him a notebook to be able to take notes at any time.


2. Keep lots of correspondence with other people.


3. To collaborate with as much people as possible with the goal of exchanging and commenting ideas with others.


4. Avoid any controversy.


5. Verify everything he was told.


6. Don't generalize, talk and write as precise as possible.

These six simple principles can be applied easily to the consultancy job to become a great consultant. I often joke saying that a consultant is someone that sells to one company what he has seen it works in another company; the only key is to see a lot of companies. While I say it as a joke, it’s not completely unreal. It’s just like a summary of some of the rules or principles Faraday applied.

1. Be able to take notes any time, in any place.
This is even more simple today thanks to our high-tech gadgets. The key is to remember all we see that has a practical or interesting application for a given task, problem, project or challenge. Since our memory is rather limited, it’s useful to take notes.

2. Keep lots of correspondence.
Talking with others is one of the best ways to learn, as long as the others know what they talk about, of course.
When I started to work in the software industry, when I was thirteen, I was always impressed about the amount of smart people that my boss, a business consultant, knew (that later became my mentor, Pere). For any problem, he knew the right person to solve it (like Mr. Wolfe in Pulp Fiction); so, as per his customers, he was always able to find an optimal solution for them to any business-related problem. This impressed me so much, and he always told me that there’s nothing as valuable as to know people, don’t matter the business field or whatsoever. So I tried to follow his steps and to know and talk with as much smart people as possible.
I guess it’s the same thing that Faraday pursuits with this second principle, but of course nowadays correspondence are easier than it was in times of Mr. Faraday, so it provides us an important advantage here.

3. Collaborate with others to exchange and comment ideas.
This is one of the bases of the scientific work, and is always one of the pillars behind open source philosophy. It’s similar to the previous one, but with a more tight sense. I think it can be related to building a strong team with a deep multidisciplinary knowledge and a tight collaboration and fluent communication between all of its members. It definitely helps to achieve a continuous improvement, if the team is well organized and coordinated.

4. Avoid any controversy.
That’s a very important point. Discussion (in the sane meaning of the word) is good, controversy leads only to destruction, undermines motivation and may stop other’s creativity.
Also, a consultant is half of a technician in his area (doesn’t matter if finance, technology…) and half of a salesman. And a salesman should be more than anything else, a good communicator, somebody with the ability to get on well with people. So avoiding controversy is a must, since it doesn’t add value to the solution that your customers are looking for, and the job of a consultant is just to provide solutions.

5. Verify everything.
I have a friend that often says that PowerPoint can hold anything, real software sometimes cannot. A consultant must be a real expert on his area, near to a guru, so as a consultant you cannot trust blindly on what you are told is good or works. You should verify everything. I have two strong reasons for that:

• You must be completely sure about the correctness of what you say or recommend, or advise clearly about your doubts to your customer; that means that you have done it before and you know that it works in this scenario.


• To be an expert in your area you need real experience in it, and you need to keep up to date your knowledge. The only way to keep up to date your knowledge is to work on it in real cases. Verifying and testing the new things you learn in your lab is a good way to do it. Then you will learn more when you apply it with a customer case.

6. Don't generalize, talk and write as precise as possible.
Communication is the key to success for many projects, and very especially in software projects or in consultancy, because in these areas you’re talking about ideas, and when the work is done maybe too late to notice that there was some kind of misunderstanding.
Engineering is a scientific work, and consultancy is often also scientific (or should be) or at least technical, and as such a technical or scientific language should be used. It means a language that, among other characteristics, is clear, precise and concrete.
I’ve been involved in projects with different people from different countries, cultures, regions and languages, and the precision in the language is fundamental to avoid problems. Even with people of the same language, culture and region, misunderstandings in the language are one of the main causes of problems and often of failure of software projects. Maybe that’s why lawyers have so much work ;-)…


I try hard to apply these principles all the time, everyday. It’s a good way to improve your professional value continuously.