Successful Business Analysis Consulting

Strategies and Tips for Going It Alone

Karl Wiegers

• Publisher: J. Ross Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781604278118
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

This volume in the Business Analysis Professional Development Series by renowned expert and best-selling author, Karl Wiegers, and a group of noteworthy contributors, provides experienced, advanced-level business analysis and project management practitioners with proven strategies and tips for making the successful transition from highly respected internal expert to a fulfilling and financially rewarding career in consulting. Key Features:

• Addresses how to effectively lay the foundation and structure of your consulting business; how to deal with or avoid the many pitfalls of working outside the corporate world and working remotely from home; and how to balance life, family, and work
• Presents a list of next steps at the end of each chapter with actions you can take immediately to begin applying the guidance and tips provided
• Furnishes valuable strategies and tips for such essentials as setting rates for your services, invoicing, purchasing appropriate insurance, establishing important business rules or policies, managing your finances and taxes, and other administrative aspects of your consultancy
• Articulates how to market your services, land both new and repeat business, negotiate deals, and craft written agreements with clients
• Describes how to establish multiple revenue streams, ways to leverage your work to develop sources of passive income, and some important issues of copyright, fair use, and managing and protecting your valuable intellectual property
• Provides sample checklists to help you keep all the activities you will be juggling as a consultant under control
• Identifies effective techniques for engaging clients in various situations, as well as warning signs about clients who can cause you headaches and how to deal with them
• Supplies solutions to a wide variety of problems and challenges of the consulting world, contributed by a group of noteworthy independent consultants with diverse experiences
• Discusses other common consultant activities that can generate a steady flow of revenue such as training, presenting at conferences, and other public speaking, and provides guidance and tips for delivering effective presentations with confidence
• Offers strategies and tips pertaining to partnering with other consultants on larger projects and how to make such arrangements work
• Examines the value of participating in professional associations and pursuing relevant professional certifications as a way to market your services and attract new clients and opportunities
• Explores the benefits of writing white papers and articles for magazines, journals, websites, and blogs as a means to simultaneously share your knowledge with the world and market your expertise to prospective clients
• Elaborates on the process and value of writing a book in the area in which you consult, how to get it published and distributed by a reputable publishing company that can reach your market, how to co-author a book effectively, and how a good selling book can be a powerful tool for getting clients and building your business
• WAV offers downloadable templates for consulting, writing, speaking, and licensing agreements, and checklists and forms to help you plan and manage your consulting business—available from the Web Added Value™ Download Resource Center at www.jrosspub.com

Part I

Setting Up Shop

1

THE JOURNEY FROM PRACTITIONER TO CONSULTANT

Practitioners in the fields of business analysis and project management follow a common career path. You begin, of course, as an entry-level novice. As you gradually accumulate knowledge and skills through both work experience and professional development activities, you move to an experienced intermediate, or journeyman, level of proficiency. Ultimately, you might become an advanced, expert-level business analyst (BA) or project manager (PM).

Senior BAs are recognized by their colleagues as experts in numerous analysis techniques. Their peers look to them for advice and assistance. Advanced BAs often are selected by management to spearhead changes in processes or methodologies on the organization’s projects. It’s an important—and valued—position to achieve.

But then what? To where do you steer your career from being a respected internal expert? Some people take their unique skill sets, organizational knowledge, business acumen, and technical knowledge and become successful business analysis consultants, trainers, and entrepreneurs. The path to consultant is paved with expertise in business analysis, product management, project management, process improvement, leadership, software development, and other areas of information technology (IT). Whether working as an employee of an established consulting firm in this industry or going it alone in a company of one, consulting offers the highly talented BA a fulfilling—and challenging—career opportunity.

WHY THIS BOOK?

There are many books on consulting written by business people who successfully climbed the corporate ladder to a senior management level and were among the fortunate few to achieve success in consulting. However, I noticed a significant void in the current consulting literature geared toward practitioners in technical fields, most noticeably in business analysis and project management. You don’t need to become a corporate executive before launching a career as an IT consultant. But you do need deep knowledge, broad experience, good observational abilities, and excellent communication skills.

I have been self-employed full-time as a software consultant since early 1998. Without necessarily planning to, I wound up specializing in software requirements and business analysis, project management, software quality, and process improvement. I began doing this sort of work even before going independent, while I was still working for a large corporation. This let me wade into the pool instead of diving straight into the deep end.

I wrote this book to share the many insights I have accumulated over the years, sometimes through the painful experience of making mistakes. This is the kind of book I wish was available before I decided to give consulting a try. Several other seasoned consultants with IT backgrounds also contributed chapters to this book to share their own experiences and perspectives. The information we present will reduce both your learning curve and the fear factor when you decide to test the waters as an independent consultant.

The examples and stories in this book come from my personal experience and those of my contributing authors working in the worlds of both traditional and agile business analysis, project management, and software development. The strategies and tips provided apply both to the practicing consultant and to those planning to make the transition to independent consultant in nearly any field. Even if independent consulting isn’t in your immediate future, you’ll discover many useful suggestions here about giving presentations, writing for publication, and working with others.

CONSULTING IN THE IT INDUSTRY

The IT industry has an abundance of consultants who perform many types of work. Some become well known in their domain, publish popular books, become featured speakers at conferences worldwide, and earn impressive incomes. Others find that they just don’t get enough business to stay afloat and have to go back to regular employment. Many independent consultants relish the diversity of the work, with its many opportunities to collect and leverage insights from their clients and to influence both practitioners in their field and the field in general. Others discover that the travel is grueling, frequent absences are hard on family life, and having an unpredictable income is unsettling. Consulting is not for everyone, but it can be a fun, rewarding, and lucrative career for those who learn how to make it work for them.

Perhaps you’ve heard this rather disparaging saying: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” I extend this by adding, “Those who did, consult.” The effective consultant has a breadth and depth of experience in his or her field, the skill to assess a situation quickly and diagnose the root causes of problems, and the ability to convey new ways of working to clients so they achieve better business outcomes. Consultants must be adaptable, able to choose the right techniques from their tool kits to suit each client’s needs and culture. By working with diverse clients, effective consultants soon recognize patterns of common problems and solutions that span organizations and business domains.

Having a wide range of project experience helps prepare you for a consulting career. But there’s more to it than that—simply being very good at what you do doesn’t necessarily make you a great consultant. You must be familiar with a rich suite of techniques in your field, so you can help people tackle many different kinds of problems effectively. You need to keep up with the literature in your domain, so you know about important topics and trends and can advise organizations based on the best available wisdom.

An effective consultant can distinguish practical techniques that we know are effective from the latest buzzword-laden fad. As a skilled observer, a good consultant notices what works and what doesn’t work in various situations and synthesizes that knowledge into practical solutions. On top of all this, a consultant must be a credible and talented communicator who can pass along frank observations about an organization’s shortcomings and gently persuade clients to try new methods.

People in IT use the term consultant in various ways. I have a friend who is a true software development consultant. He’s one of the world’s leading experts in a particular programming language. He doesn’t build software for clients, but he is highly respected as an authority who can come into an organization and convey deep insights that help developers solve leading-edge problems in that language. On the other hand, many software development consultants are really independent contractors who are self-employed and find their own jobs writing code for one client after another.

Some BAs also work as independent contractors, coming into an organization for a period of time and performing BA services on development projects, either on their own or as part of a BA team. Business analysis naturally lends itself to this form of consulting since the team role is not necessarily full-time throughout the entire duration of the project and BAs are accustomed to moving from project to project. True expert consultants, though, might lead and coach a team of BAs. They could deliver training, or they may assess and then advise organizations about how to tune up their current BA practices and address performance shortcomings. Consultants will sometimes help develop and instill new techniques into organizations and steer them to a more sophisticated business analysis culture.

Similarly, project management consultants can either work on contract, leading one project after another, or they can train and coach the organization’s own PMs to enhance their effectiveness. Some PM consultants specialize in project recovery—coming in to get a struggling project back on track.

Still other kinds of IT consultants focus on process improvement or change leadership, helping organizations evolve. Or, they might specialize in particular areas of software development, such as architecture, software design, database development, or testing. Some experts help their clients learn to use specific languages, methodologies, or development tools. The varieties of IT consulting match the varieties of IT work.

Both business analyst and project manager are project roles. Someone must perform these essential tasks on every project. They might have the corresponding job title (or an equivalent, such as requirements engineer, requirements analyst, or systems analyst), or they might do it along with other project responsibilities, such as coding or quality assurance. Traditional software teams often are accustomed to having these roles staffed by specialists, whereas BA and PM responsibilities may be distributed across multiple individuals on agile development teams. As projects become larger and more complex, the need for team members who are very good at business analysis and project management increases. Organizations that lack BA or PM expertise can benefit from bringing in consultants in those areas to educate and advise. That’s where you come in.

The diversity of independent consulting experiences is practically boundless. You can guide your career in whatever direction you like, taking best advantage of the kinds of work you find most satisfying—so long as the phone rings enough to keep you in business.

HOW I GOT HERE

By way of background, let me describe how I got started in the consulting business. After obtaining a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois, I began my professional career in 1979 as a research scientist at Kodak in Rochester, New York. Computer programming was my second interest after chemistry; one-third of my PhD thesis was code. For several reasons, I moved into software development full-time at Kodak in 1984. Six years later, I took over as the manager of my small software group.

I began learning as much as I could about software process improvement through books, periodicals, and conferences. Soon I found myself helping other groups inside Kodak with various aspects of software development, thus serving as an internal consultant and trainer. This ultimately led to a position guiding software process improvement efforts in one of Kodak’s digital imaging technology areas. Shortly before I left the company, I was leading process improvements in Kodak’s web development group, the people who bring you kodak.com.

In 1991, I began speaking at conferences, while continuing to write magazine articles about various aspects of software engineering. Three years later I received my first invitation to speak at another company on some of the work I’d been writing about. More of these types of opportunities arose, thanks to my increasing visibility as an author and speaker. Before long I was delivering training and consulting services for other companies on my vacation time, while still working full-time at Kodak. This was all done with my management’s knowledge and approval. It was a comfortable way to ease into a consulting career.

My first book, Creating a Software Engineering Culture, was published in 1996, while I was still at Kodak. Shortly thereafter, a well-known software consultant asked when I was going to leave the corporate world and hang out a shingle as an independent consultant. My initial reaction was that this seemed pretty risky, considering that I like to eat every day. But after reflection, I decided to give it a shot.

I officially launched my one-person consulting company—Process Impact—in December of 1997. A few months later I left Kodak to see how things might go on my own. I figured I could always get a real job again if consulting didn’t work out for whatever reason. As it happened, being an independent consultant, trainer, and author has worked out just fine.

BEING SELF-EMPLOYED

Some consultants find work through agencies. Others are employed by a company that contracts their consulting services out to clients. However, with one six-month exception very early on, I’ve always worked entirely on my own through Process Impact. (Incidentally, I have found that, even in a one-person company, management is uninformed and unreasonable, and the staff is lazy and has a bad attitude.) When I started out, I knew little about this new mode of employment, yet I had few resources from which to learn.

I did learn several things about consulting early on. First, I was fortunate to get plenty of work. That was a relief, as many new consultants struggle to stay afloat. Second, I found that I really enjoyed the flexibility of being self-employed. While at Kodak, I concluded that I do not need to be managed and I do not enjoy being a manager, so self-employment in a one-person shop suits me well. And third, I discovered that there’s a lot to learn about being a self-employed, self-managed independent consultant.

Many of the strategies and tips in this book will also be useful to practitioners—sometimes called consultants—who are engaged in staff-augmentation contracting relationships as temporary corporate or government employees. Certain topics covered here might not be as important to consultants who work for larger companies rather than being self-employed. But even if you aren’t on your own at the moment, someday you might be.

CASTING A LARGE NET FOR KNOWLEDGE

When I told my Kodak colleagues I was going to give consulting a shot, someone asked how I’d be able to keep up with what was happening in the software industry if I didn’t work on projects anymore. That was an interesting question I hadn’t considered. However, I quickly realized that, as a consultant, I could see how many projects and organizations operated, instead of just observing a few projects in one company for a prolonged period. Instead of making every mistake and climbing every learning curve myself, I could learn by looking over other people’s shoulders. Everyone I met at a client site, conference, or professional society meeting was a potential source of knowledge.

Visiting a wide variety of companies was far more informative than working inside a single microcosm with people steeped in the same corporate culture. It let me collect a breadth of information that I could then share with others, for a very reasonable price. I’m pretty good at synthesizing knowledge from multiple sources, packaging it, and ...