Congratulations! You've been hired by a client to get something done. Presumably, you have some sort of expertise in the area, you have someone on your team who is knowledgeable, or you’ll be hiring somebody who does.
This book provides some of the lessons I've learned over my 35-year career about managing consulting projects.
You will learn:
* How to create a Statement of Work and what the SOW should include
* How to control change
* Controlling the chaos of a project
* What to do about the micromanaging client
* How to handle meetings
* How to communicate with your client
* What to do when it all goes south
During my second semester in college, I arrived late at the twice-annual tradition of registration. To my dismay, the good classes were filled, and all that was left were a couple of computer courses with funny sounding names. This was long before computers were cool. In fact, I’d never seen one before and only knew about them from science fiction stories.
I didn’t want to take a computer class, but there was nothing left, and I had to fill my schedule. I signed up, and by the end of the first day of the first class I was hooked.
My teacher was a very tall man—almost 7 feet— and very knowledgeable and likable. His name was Fred, and after a single semester I knew what I was going to be doing with the rest of my life.
Near the end of the semester, I was awarded my first consulting gig. This involved correcting some bugs in the general ledger programs that ran on a TRS-80 computer. At the time, this was the most modern machine that could be purchased. It came complete with 16kKB of memory and two 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives. I was overconfident, underprepared, and very naïve. I had my eye on the $600 that was offered to complete the job and didn’t realize that I didn’t know how to fix the programs until it was too late.
Looking back on those days, I realize I did everything wrong that I could possibly do wrong. I didn’t validate my assumptions, didn’t write an SOW, and didn’t terminate the contract when I found I was in over my head.
Now, 35 years later, I’ve been a part of or managed over a thousand consulting projects. Some of these were small, lasting an hour or two, some required weeks of labor, and others needed teams of 20 people working for months at a time.
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Dutch
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Already translated.
Translated by Marlies Perman
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Rafaella C. S. Barros
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Spanish
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Already translated.
Translated by Laura Zunk Parras
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