Chilling Consultant Moment
You’re called in to help troubleshoot a problem. You get very little background. They worship you’re technical abilities and figure you can fix any problem in a few hours. The reality is they may have a problem you’ve never seen before and that you can’t fix in a few hours or maybe even a few days.
Another reason I don’t miss the professional services world quite so much.
Ed Gibbs @ January 2, 2007
Haha, well if all problems were easy to fix then you might as well give your client a help document and let them solve it themselves.
The fact that professional consulting is quite lucrative and challenging should be enough… that’s how I see it.
I’ve walked in almost blind to a few nasty situations and survived, but it’s always a very nervous situation until you start to find out the parameters of their actual problem.
The sad part is sometimes the fix can be turned up on Google within an hour and implemented pretty quickly, but the organization threw their hands up at the situation too early.
In general longer term engagements are much easier to deal with because you’ve gone through the whole discovery process in bidding on the job.