Ability to Strike a Rapport with the Customer

The most important trait a consultant must have is the ability to strike a rapport. Client engagement involves an interaction between two teams who are mature, professional, and accomplished.

The basic premise of this interaction is that each individual is different. Everybody comes with an ego. They have past credibility, track record, self-respect and self-confidence. Hence, the Consultant’s role is very challenging. He is required to establish an engagement model or a relationship wherein, he is looked at as an expert and the customer takes his suggestions and guidelines, seriously.

Being Knowledgeable

There is no substitute for the genuine knowledge in respective area of IT service is being provided. Clients typically approach an external consultant for two reasons: 1) the client expects the consultant to have more expertise than the organization’s internal resources or 2) because clients do not have sufficient time to solve their own problems or implement their own projects. As consultants, the level of knowledge should be broad enough to know when to ask questions and/or where to research to find solutions.

Projecting an Image That Matches with the Company’s Image

Depending on the level of seniority, the consulting role may involve business development as well as some pre-sales activities. In this case, the consultant ends up interacting with very senior people in the industry, the decision makers, owners, or the promoters of different businesses to whom his organization is offering consulting. The consultant must know how to represent his organization at the highest level. He should project an image that matches with the company’s image.

Building Customer Trust

The consultant needs to create a winning impression through his personality, behavior so that the customers start believing in him and start trusting him. So building customer trust is another extremely important parameter. His personality plays a big role in creating the first impression in the mind of the customer and building mutual trust and confidence.

The consulting engagement or assignment may not be too long. So in a very short span of time, in the early few communications itself the consultant has to create the first impression in such a way that the customer starts believing in him as an expert. This builds trust and the customer understands the consultant’s way of working, his discipline, professionalism, and then automatically starts cooperating with him towards the change.

Team Player

Consultants must demonstrate that they are team players and are willing to learn from team members, genuinely valuing the input and expertise of others. It is important to establish a collaborative relationship with peers.

Should I start with what is Cloud based solution? I guess you will be bored. We all have a variety of answers for this question. I am trying to bring that focus back in this discussion on what are the key elements of a cloud based Solution. Everything as a service or anything as service has been one of the most challenging and successful use cases in this decade and this is not just in the I.T world. What started as outsourcing and shared services model has now evolved into Cloud based services. A CXO wanted to outsource HR, recruitment and Finance function. There are companies which take up these functions and bring in cost efficiencies by using a shared team which can contract or expand based on work demand. Sounds familiar. I am sure you can draw parallels to what happens in a Cloud based environment as well. What started with human capital has now slowly moved towards non-human resources including Computing, Storage, and Software Applications. So what is the difference between an internet based solution – Web Application, Website versus Cloud based solution. A company writes a web application using php, host it on an Apache web application server. The Web application collects customer data and create customer accounts in a MySQL database. All the infrastructure runs on a Data center with a web hosting company where your domain is registered as well. Now the company wants to sell this application. Let us call it Customer Acquire. Company sells it to customer A. Customer A wants to brand it uniquely to their requirements and starts using it to acquire its subscribers. Company now sells it to Customer B tomorrow. Company has to setup another web app server with another instance of MYSQL database preferably running on another separate physical server and then provide this web link to Company B. So now you see the problem. Tomorrow if company has 100 customers, how will it scale physically from a server perspective from an infrastructure perspective and application instance?

For every customer, we need to create a new instance of the Software application “Customer Acquire” running on Apache web server instance. Tomorrow the Company has 1000 customers. So there are 1000 instances of the same application running across 1000 web application servers on a virtualized environment. Company is introducing a new feature that allows customer to add ID and address proof documents. It becomes a release nightmare to apply this new feature across 1000 instances. Then we speak about multi-tenancy as a concept for the same instance is virtualized to support multiple customers/tenants.

So now Company brings multi-tenancy to this software application and it solves the issue. Company has 1000 customers running on essentially the same software application instance. Company wants to add new features to its Customer Acquire application without interrupting current service that it offers. It takes us back to architecture principles of micro services. Simple analogy of a service is how Unix commands are designed and developed (ls, mkdir, ps). A Micro service is independent, deployable, small and modular service which runs on its own process space and communicates using REST or SOAP based architecture. Transition from a web based internet hosted application to a cloud based application has been evolutionary driven by demands of the market and the underlying evolution of technology to support and nurture it. So what is the flip side of all this. Flip side is obvious. There are data privacy compliances. You are driven more by what the Cloud solution/product has to offer than by what your requirements are. There is level of freedom on customization. When we talk about Organizational behaviour, there are studies that Creativity is curbed once IT functions are outsourced or moved to Cloud. People try to work around the cloud solution rather than coming up a solution that is innovative and creative. Now let us talk about total cost of ownership. This evolution towards Cloud based solution and computing is primarily targeting at reducing TCO and also ensuring that Customers can get into subscription based payment model rather than having to create a big capital investment. There are recent studies that the cost equation is advantageous only up to a particular scale and companies prefer on premise solution once scale increases.

So what is that we have to do in the upcoming months? Sign up for free trials of cloud based software – CRM, Subscription commerce solution, E Commerce application, ERP and try understanding the benefits and limitations. Sign up with AWS and buy some computing, storage and write a simple micro service that can be hosted on cloud. If you want to take it to the next level, finish the AWS cloud certification or Azure cloud certification. We should do whatever it takes to get closer to Cloud based solutions/computing.

The below diagram is just a sample foot print of applications, resources and services offered as a Service.

We were about to start on our tour of 20 days to the client place in Ri-yadh, Saudi Arabia. The client was SBM and we were working on a imple-mentation for ITCC/KAFD. It was a green field telecom implementation. This was my 4th tour to Saudi Arabia and I was travelling with my col-leagues Chandra K (ASAP SME), Girisha (BRM SME) and of course I was travelling as a UIM SME.

After a 4 hours journey from Kempegowda International Airport, we land-ed at Dubai Airport. We had to wait here for more than 10 hours, we decided to rest and found a sleeper berth found in a waiting area. Early morning, we woke up, got fresh and went to a nearby Burger King restau-rant and had some so called breakfast, using the coupon which was pro-vided by Airlines as our wait time was more than 3 hours. We boarded into flight and started off to our final destination, Riyadh.

It was a 2 hour flight from Dubai to Riyadh and Immediately after we land-ed in Riyadh, we had to for immigration. The process was faster and we managed to take a London Taxi and headed to Plaza Inn hotel which is located on the Olaya street.. Riyadh is a city which is in middle of desert and for our view, we can see some artificially implanted treed on the high-ways. Generally roads are some 6 way and big enough to travel at some 120 KMPH speed. Saudi Arabia follows Right / Left standard which is fol-lowed by 90 % countries across the world. This is quite opposite to what we experience in India and in some British common wealth countries.

The new SBM Office is setup inside the ITCC compound, located on Aamir Turkey Road, opposite Imam Saad University. . in this office there are a lot of people working from various countries, such as India, Paki-stan, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Uruguay, Portugal etc. and of course Saudi Arabian nationals. Interestingly in this office we could found very few Sau-di Arabian nationals and mostly working staff are expats from above men-tioned countries. Our team was mostly from Pakistan, although our out-going Manager Luis Repetto, was from Uruguay, our new incoming man-ager Amad Khan, was from Pakistan. As everyone come from various nationalities, it is interesting to be there are some interesting but, some neutral discussions keeps happening, as everyone are highly experienced and most importantly highly skilled. This office has a mini cafeteria with some soft beverages. As the ITCC compound is under construction, there were absolutely no arrangements for food courts or any restaurants. For lunch we had to take taxi or mostly go with our India collegues everyday to some unknown but interestingly very good restaurants.

“Health is wealth” is an evergreen statement by our forefathers.

While we are in race with normal wealth, the real wealth called health is least cared by most of the software goers.

It is very much obvious that the kind of work for which we are responsible is sedentary one.

It cannot be avoidable but can be very well manageable if one cares for his/her health.

This is what Dalai Lama speaks about health and is a bitter truth:

“What thing about humanity surprises you the most?”
The Dalai Lama’s answer was as follows: Man
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health.
Then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present,
and as a result he does not live in the present or the future.
He lives as if he’s never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.

My personal experience is that I can perform to my best when I am perfectly healthy. Perfect health in my opinion is balance of both mental and physical health. To achieve this work-out atleast for 30 minutes per day. Major physical or cardio-vascular activities like walking, jogging, running. More of it should be a cardiovascular activity.

‘He who has health has hope and he who has hope has everything.’ - Anonymous

A few suggestions are listed as below:

• Learn basic breathing techniques like Meditation, Anulom- Vilom. Meditation helps to have clarity in your thoughts and help you concentrate on your task.
• Yogasana’s also offer equal amount of benefits

Summarizing this article, As per my personal experience the benefits are—

• Stress-free life
• Positivity in thoughts and actions
• No worries.
• Clarity of thoughts and Brimming with Confidence

To keep up the Motto going there is going to be a Marathon on Sunday,12th July. Lets join this event and we can form a Scube group. UN has declared June 21st to be “International Yoga Day”. What a way to start !