Category: Work

A Long Six Months

2011-04-25 / spierzchala / 0 Comments

If you had asked me six months ago what I would be doing today, I am pretty sure that I would have been wrong. Wrong on a galatic scale.

GPS has stopped working. Maps tell me that even the Dragons don’t come out this far – I saw a few Dragons in cheap suits selling insurance to travellers on the edge of this territory; should have been a clue. Even the people who have better maps than I do are leading expeditions into uncharted sinkholes and rivers that are “in the wrong place”.

There is no way to fully map what is going to come next. There is a general plan, usually a back-of-the-napkin-map from a dive bar in the last “town” (interestingly enough, drawn by a dragon in a cheap suit). Sometimes there is even a guide (for many expeditions, the guide is a one-eyed, deaf jungle-dweller who communicates via a language of spit and arm movements). In the end, it’s up to your cunning and intelligence to avoid a death so embarrassing, your ancestors will need to changes their names.

So, in order to bring order to this trackless territory, I have begun to lay down some simple rules, ones that will help me keep the jungle madness at bay.

A full calendar does not mean an effective day. The last 10 weeks have seen me in meetings up to six hours a day. Most of the meetings were not for extracting information from customers. Some fell into the Kafka-esque “debrief on the project status meeting so we can update the project plan and prepare for the next project status meeting” family.

And I am not alone.

Customers I work with are often in so many meetings that must be attended personally that the only time to get work done is in meetings. If you’re wandering around the trackless wilds spending all your time updating the map, tracking the menu, and inventorying the clean socks, when you look up from your work, you have missed the point of the trip. Or worse, realize that in the minutiae of the “important” stuff, you have reached a place that you can’t get out of without losing a good chunk of your expedition team.

So, why did you bother coming? Showing up is only 10% of being successful. Paying attention is the real 90%.

Guess what? Other people can help you do it all. Guess what? You’re not the only person who can count socks.

I have become very good at delegating, for reasons that are good, under circumstances that were questionable. You came on this expedition with a team. Use it. There are people who can do the things you think only you can do. This frees you up to do the things that you are good at, like avoiding the impassible canyon (unless your team is big on a diet of bark and spider eggs).

And maybe one or two of the sock counters will show promise by projecting the date of clean sock exhaustion and suggesting that a route to clean water be prioritized for everyone’s foot health. This means that they could help take over some of the map-reading so you can collect those bug samples you’re after.

Delegating work does not mean you are failing. Delegating work means that you are succeeding in maintaining a focus on what’s important.

Every day is a learning experience. I am so far into uncharted territories for myself right now that the map isn’t even helpful at figuring out where I came from. All I know is that new challenges pop up every day, and learning from them helps me get by and press forward.

Career Reform: Selling your Way Out of the Paper Bag

2010-03-24 / spierzchala / 2 Comments

One of the things that all consultants have to accept is that selling is a part of the territory. Doesn’t matter if you are a solopreneur or an associate consultant in 10,000 person firm, selling is an everyday occurrence.

Sounds like a cliché, but it’s true. Everything a consultant does or says is part of their ongoing selling process. Skills and experience must constantly be sold to customers.

It’s hard to sell, if you stop and think about it. You have to convince people, strangers, that you or your firm have the skills to solve the problem that the customer has identified, and to demonstrate that you can identify and solve problems that the customer may not know they have.

How do you do it? There is no easy answer. My experience is that selling customers is often not about the products or services themselves, but about selling the value and the solutions that your experience brings to the equation on top of the products or services. Selling is about believing that what you can do for the customer is beyond what they could achieve themselves, but which will make them far more successful than they would be on their own.

Selling Consulting services requires self-confidence, and a willingness to leave your ego at the door. What the customer thinks they need, and what they position with you or the sales team that they have been working with, are often only their tactical, short-term needs. Customers often are unwilling to accept the solution they really need. Sometimes, the consultant has to accept starting with the partial solution sale to get the customer to accept the larger problem.

Leaving your ego at the door makes accepting the initial compromise easier to accept. Good consultants see the short-term, tactical project as the way in. But if that’s all that you are able to sell, then you may need to reflect on how you are positioning yourself.

Selling consulting is a process that is continuous, even with customers that you are already working with. Being a consultant means that you must always listen, observe, and sell. Reputation, relationships, and experience/skills only get you so far. Selling it, be it yourself or the solution the customer really needs, is what takes you the next step.

How do you sell consulting services? How do you sell yourself as a consultant?

Career Reform – From Analyst to Consultant

2010-03-19 / spierzchala / 2 Comments

For many years my professional title has included the word “consultant”, and with it the gravitas that comes with being able to use that term. In the cold, hard light of my early-40s, in all honesty I have say that I was not a consultant for most of that time: I was an analyst.

Analyst versus consultant. What’s the difference?
In black and white terms, an analyst is a tactical consultant, with a specific set of skills and knowledge that can be used to solve a particular problem. And a consultant is…?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Inigo Montoya

Consultant is over-used and mis-used word. All the people I know who call themselves consultants are actually analysts, contractors, or skilled professionals who call themselves consultants for lack of a better term to describe what they do to pay the bills, and because putting Gun For Hire on a business card tends to attract the wrong clientele.

On the other end of the spectrum, consultant is more than a term to describe a person who works in a large consultancy or professional services firm (or as, Andrea Mulligan is working through in public, a professional service practice in a software or SaaS firm). A consultant comes to a customer with a set of skills that cannot be had just anywhere, be it in a programming language, GAAP restructuring, or, in my case, Web performance measurement and load testing.

A true consultant must be more than a skilled analysts who has chosen the freedom of working outside large companies, leaping from challenge to challenge. A consultant brings years of experience and a view of the larger world with them. In fact, many of the best consultants can’t do what their analysts do for them (or maybe the consultant’s skills are just too rusty) on a daily basis.

Analysts solve a specific problem. Consultants ensure that the problem never happens again.

Consultants put the problem that analysts solve into context.

For more than a decade, I have been an analyst, solving whatever thorny riddle is put in front of me using whatever tools and skills I could cobble together. Analysts don’t have a lifetime career ahead of them, as their skill-set falls out of favor or is replaced by younger, more talented analysts.

Consultants take what they have learned during their analyst/apprentice days and convert that into a strategic view. Not simply How do we solve this problem? but Is this the right problem to solve? or How did we get to the point where we needed to solve this problem?

And, most importantly, Is the solution we’re developing flexible enough to adapt to solve and prevent problems we can’t even foresee now?

It’s hard for someone like me who revels in solving the problems no one else can to let go and realize that the problem isn’t everything. To realize that there are people out there who can do what I do as well as or better than I can.

Letting go of one thing means that you have to have something else to grab onto. I do not relish Wily Coyote moments: looking down to see the fall that’s about to come.

So, at 42, I am stepping back to embrace a very new and different career question: What does it really mean to be a strong consultant?

It’s not easy to shift gears, and drop into the career lane that I had avoided for so long, feeling it a trap. I now know that to survive and flourish, I have to understand how the business works, how practice/company goals are set and met, how to effectively sell professional service (something I am awful at a lot of the time), and how to position professional services within the SaaS model.

It is a somewhat disheartening realization that the 10 years I spent fighting becoming a strong consultant now have to be made up in a very short amount of time, but the games everyone remembers are those that are won from behind in overtime.

Modern Business and the Culture of Assurance

2009-03-19 / spierzchala / 0 Comments

I often wonder how much business is lost but the levels of assurance that exist within modern companies.

As information passes through and upward through a company, it is filtered, shaped, refined down to the one salient decision point that all the executives can then discuss. The concern that I have is whether the devolution of detail within organizations stifles their ability to innovate, especially in times of stress.

Small companies have a short distance from those that create and work with the product to the senior levels. As a result, senior managers and executives are tightly tied to the details of the product, of the company, of the customers. They understand that details are important.

Mature companies discuss how their strategies and initiatives will shape an entire industry and change the way everyone does business. But how that happens is often lost as those concepts flow downward. Just as detail devolves on the way up, detail evolves on the way down.

It is nigh on impossible to participate in an industry-defining paradigm shift when your everyday activities double and triple, leading to a complete dissociation between the executive level and the worker level.

Why does this occur?

Its not that detail devolves on the way up an organization, but rather that each level needs to assure each higher level that everything is ok and that solutions can be found for those issues that may be challenging, so lets just keep pressing forward.

So the devolution of detail coupled with the culture of assurance gets too many companies in trouble.

The devil is in the details. And sometimes, the devil can be your friend.

Why Terms Matter: Consultant v. SME v. Evangelist

2008-11-26 / spierzchala / 0 Comments

The term consultant is bandied about so much in this new economy that it has lost it’s meaning. Wikipedia defines a consultant as

A consultant (from the Latin consultare means “to discuss” from which we also derive words such as consul and counsel) is a professional who provides advice in a particular area of expertise….
A consultant is usually an expert or a professional in a specific field and has a wide knowledge of the subject matter. A consultant usually works for a consultancy firm or is self-employed, and engages with multiple and changing clients. Thus, clients have access to deeper levels of expertise than would be feasible for them to retain in-house, and to purchase only as much service from the outside consultant as desired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consultant

What this definition misses is that a good consultant, especially in a small firm, is not simply a person with specific subject-matter expertise and therefore a subject-matter expert (SME), a consultant is a jack-of-all-trades.
A simple list of skills needed by a good consultant include:

Sales
Project Management
Product Management
Educator
Trainer
Mentor and Coach
Business Manager
Subject-Matter Expert

In large consulting organizations, these functions are broken out into specific team members. In a small consultancy, everyone has to be able to manage all of these items.

Then there is another leap: How does a consultant move to being an evangelist? These two roles are substantially different.

While both are SMEs, an evangelist takes that one final step from being a functional expert who is able to make things happen and work in a product to a place where they can stand in front of any audience and make the product sing. It is not just able the abilty to do anymore; it is about the ability to show.

Go through the list of people that you or your organization work with. Do you work with true consultants, SMEs, or evangelists? Which group is most effective in helping your organization get better? Are you using consultants as expert problem-solvers, or are you simply using them as staff augmentation?

To draw on my experience, I am learning to be a better small-firm consultant. I have developed my skills as a SME and Evangelist over the last decade, but I have not had to be worried about any of the things listed above until the last two years when I started working in a more structured consulting/Professional Services environment.

What has your experience been? Did you start as a SME and become a consultant?

Or did you come out of B-school and then develop into a SME?

How has your development as a consultant affected the clients you have worked with and experiences you have had?

Why Do I Do This? – Educate, Guide, and Solve

2008-10-09 / spierzchala / 0 Comments

This is the year I turn 40. As a result, I am looking back upon my life, my career, and trying to determine what I do best. If I could make my life into an elevator pitch, what would it be?

I decided to take what I do right now and see how low I could take it. What does my career boil down to?

It came down to three simple words: Educate, Guide, and Solve.
Each of these describes a facet of my career that provides a profound sense of personal satisfaction. Each of these is unique in that they give me the chance to share what I know with others, while still gaining new experiences in the process.

These three things are simultaneously selfish and selfless. I believe that in order to have a successful, productive, and fulfilling career, these three things need to serve as the foundation of everything I do.

Educate

I work in a small community of Web performance analysts. I have spent years training myself to see the world through the eyes of a Web site and how it presents to the outside world. As I taught myself to see the world this way, I was asked to share what I knew with others.

At first I did this through technical support and a training course I helped develop. Then I moved into consulting. I began to blog and comment on Web performance.
I needed to share what I knew with others, because it is meaningless to hoard all of your knowledge. While I am paid well as a consultant, it is also important that as many people as possible learn from me; and that doesn’t always need to sold to the highest bidder.

Guide

While some may say that there is no difference between Guide and Educate, I see a profound chasm between the two.

We have all been educated at some point. We have sat through classes and lectures and labs that convey information to us, and have provided the foundation for what we know.

But we have also encountered people who have shown us how to step beyond the information. They place the information that they are giving us in a larger context, allow us to see problems as a component of the whole.

That is what I strive to do. Not only do I want to give people the functional tools they need to interpret the data, I want them to then take that data and see the patterns in the data. I work closely with colleagues and customers, helping them see the patterns, understand how they tie to the things I say everyday, and then be able to solve this type of problem on their own the next time.

A guide is only useful when the path is not known. Once I have showed someone the path, I can return to my place, in the knowledge that they are as experienced on the path as I am.

Solve

Once you have shown someone what the data can do, how to see the patterns, it is critical that they have an understand how to take that pattern and change it for the better. Seeing a pattern and understanding its cause are only the beginning.
I can share my experiences, share how others have solved problems similar to this one, help them fix the problem.

And then be able to show that the problem is solved. An unmeasured, yet resolved problem, is meaningless.

Summary

This is the skeletal description of what I want to achieve in my career. I could expand these topics for a lot longer, but the question I propose is: What three concepts can you boil your career down to?

The best times on a business trip…

2007-11-03 / spierzchala / 0 Comments

Part of the problem with making a lot of East to West trips across the US is that the flights back are a nightmare for timing. You either lose most of a day or have to take a red-eye.

Well, taking the red-eye has only one advantage: you get to camp in the airline lounge and get some work done that you have been too tired/jetlagged to deal with.

I am in the United Red Carpet Lounge. It is 18:33 PDT, and my flight boards at 22:00 PDT. I have been here since 15:00 PDT. I have caught up with a client project, completed my (dreaded) weekly timesheet, booked accommodation for my Columbus, OH trip, and tidied up an analysis script that I use to process client measurement data.

Seems odd that this is the most productive time of the week.

This trip is a 48-hour turnaround from Boston to LA to finish up the project for a large client. The first half was handled by some colleagues, and was detailed here.

Then, when I get home, I have to go to NYC (Long Island City actually) for the day on Monday. And, as I mentioned above, Columbus which is set for the middle of the month.

Compared to some jet-setters out there, this is nothing. But I travelled so much between August 15 and November 15 that I went from 2,000 miles on United to well into Premier (24,000+ miles). This trip makes the fourth cross-country trip in 2.5 months. Not bad for a homebody.

I have three more hours. Think I will sit back and watch Trois Couleurs: Blanc.

Telecommuting and Career Advancement

2007-01-18 / spierzchala / 2 Comments

The Network World article on telecommuting appears to be getting a lot of play this morning on the RSS feeds.

I agree with Daemon at the Web Worker Daily: Yeah, and your point?

I learned a long time ago that I would NEVER be happy as a do-nothing management hack (whoops! did I say that out loud?). Career advancement to me is an out-dated way of life, and those that are desperately hanging on to this ideal are this generation’s answer to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or The Organization Man.

What does career advancement mean in a world that is mobile, engagement-based, driven by accomplishment, not by success? Career advancement is a growth in the respect in which you and your skills are held. Titles become meaningless; generating buzz and delivering on it are what define your success.

Time to raise the controversy element: The people who see telecommuting as a career negative are those that can only survive in a herd. Those who cannot generate their own motivation. Those who need to be away from themselves, to not hear the voices in their heads.

Some of the people I hold in highest regard have no title, and would be seen by corporate types as “drop-outs”.

Guess that makes me a drop-out. Bully for me.

The Joy and Stigma of Burnout

2006-12-07 / spierzchala / 4 Comments

Today, the sun is shining and I am working from home, so things don’t seems as bad.

The last few days have been interesting, as I have become more aware that the my work-related anger and dissatisfaction does not originate with the people at work, or the place I work, or the work itself, but from that beast that so many white-collar professionals suffer from: burnout.

Burnout is not sexy. In the US and Canada, it is seen as a sign of weakness, a lack of the American Work Ethic. NPR had a great discussion of burnout this week, and New York Magazine published a cover article on it this week.

Listening to NPR on Monday, there was a story of how the US armed forces are punishing soldiers who return from Iraq and are diagnosed with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) [here]. The successful soldiers see the soldiers (what defines success for a soldier?) with PTSD as weaklings, people who should be punished, pushed out onto the streets, stripped of their American citizenship as cowards and traitors.

I do not claim that PTSD and work-related burnout are equal; my focus here is on the stigma that the US culture places on doing the job, regardless of what the job does to you.

You can do the job. Good. What kind of person are you?

I am a rebel. I do not fit the US success criteria. I don’t want a title. I don’t want a box on an org chart. I don’t want to have the biggest bank account. And I have no respect for people who worship at the temple of US success until they show me that they can do something that I respect.

Today. I wrote an email to my manager and VP stating that during my Christmas break this year, I will be completely unreachable for anything work-related.

Unreachable for EVERYTHING work-related.

It is likely that I will be seen as “letting the team down”, as it is not only end-of-quarter, but end-of-year.

You know what? I don’t care. I am more important than my job. If the company I work for now doesn’t recognize that, I will find a new company.

You know who the most successful people I know are? My friends who “dropped out” of the corporate world, moved to Maine, and are slaving, day and night, to get their under-funded winery project off the ground. While raising three kids. While renovating and repairing 200-year old farm buildings.

Success does not come from money, power, or a title. I comes from having the respect of the people around you. I comes from a desire to get up in the morning and do something that completes you, fills a void inside you.

Right now, when I get up, I step into a void.

Burnout. It’s here to stay.

A little close to home…

2005-08-17 / spierzchala / 2 Comments

In Lisa Haneberg’s article, I fall into the first category.

Lisa, this is not weird, but it is becoming increasingly common as the knowledge worker generation collides with the industrial management culture we still hold.

I want to do more. See more clients. Solve more problems.

When I am bored, my productivity decreases exponentially. When I am challenged and pushed, my productivity increases exponentially.

We want challenges, not obstacles.

That said, my resume is drifting around like a message in a bottle.