What is a Software Consultant

They borrow your watch to tell you the time, and what’s more, they charge you for it!

While it may contain a kernel of truth, this characterisation falls short. It stems from the fact that much of the value good consultants provide is less visible on the surface. As someone who has worn many hats, I’m here to explain what effective software consulting entails in reality. Sure, an outside expert can sometimes illuminate the apparent or serve as an objective sounding board. However, leveraging experience from a variety of contexts, bringing in best practices, providing thoughtful analysis, and accelerating progress on initiatives that may have languished – that is where we truly deliver value.

This post will reveal insights from the practical experience and dispel myths around consultants as overpaid outsiders armed with common sense. I’ll also explore the key qualities that set truly exceptional advisors apart from those who fit the unflattering stereotypes. My goal is to provide a transparent inside look so that clients can not only set more realistic expectations, but set their consultants up for success from the start.

Dispelling the Myths

Let’s dive in by examining some prevalent myths:

Myth #1 Consultants Simply State the Obvious

It’s easy to see how this perception originates. Many clients bring in outside experts for a fresh set of eyes, when they feel too close to a problem to see the solution. External consultants with diverse experience can shine light on issues that now seem glaringly obvious, yet somehow avoided detection thus far.

However, any advisor worth their salt does much more heavy lifting behind the scenes before stating an “obvious” finding. Consultancies typically undertake rigorous data gathering and analysis of current challenges, best practices, and the unique needs of the client's situation before making recommendations. While we ultimately make a living by connecting dots our clients may have missed, it does a disservice to the upfront work involved.

Myth #2 Consultants Fail to Stick Around

Another misconception is that consultants have short attention spans – we’re seemingly always off to the next client without seeing current initiatives through. Sometimes constraints outside a consultant's control necessitate shorter engagements.

Sometimes the client just wants advice distilled into a slide deck and that's all. In my experience though, consultants often prefer longer-term collaborations to have more influence and see tangible impacts. Consultants able to cultivate lasting client relationships grounded in trust and transparency deliver exponentially more value over time. The key is aligning expectations upfront around scope, duration, and goals to enable consultants to drive sustained, meaningful outcomes rather than flee the scene.

Where Consultants Add Value

Consultants truly earn their keep by moving the needle for clients, here's how:

Leveraging Broad Experience

The most consultants accumulate extensive experience solving complex problems across diverse industries and organisations. Exposure to varied contexts, leadership styles, corporate cultures, and business models allows for versatile solutions. Consultants can synthesise learnings into unique frameworks, which can round out the institutional knowledge an internal client team has from a single company lens. An outside expert asks the naive questions an insider no longer can, bringing an invaluable perspective.

Introducing Best Practices

Seasoned consultants also stay on the pulse of bleeding edge best practices that in-house teams often lack bandwidth to continually explore. Whether lean product development, design thinking, agile delivery, technical debt management, or cloud migration, we can apply novel approaches across companies and verticals. It’s challenging for any one organisation to pioneer new methodologies while also running the core business. Consultancies add value by aggregating from various new areas of innovation.

Providing Unbiased External Perspective

Even with progress lagging, it’s difficult for internal teams to assess the underlying root causes hindering an initiative’s success objectively. There may be political landmines or face-saving concerns clouding the truth. As independent players without pre-conceived alliances, consultants can assess situations without distortion. We provide recommendations anchored in data free of internal biases.

Building Knowledge Transfer

The best engagements also incorporate active knowledge sharing to equip in-house staff with new capabilities that stick around long after external experts depart. Consulting teams committed to coaching through challenging assignments tangibly transform the capacity of client partners. Whether public workshops, one-on-one mentoring, or interactive group sessions, deliberate skill-building creates long-lasting knowledge.

Traits of Great Consultants

Now that we’ve explored the unique value highly-skilled consultants impart, what separates good advisors from great ones?

Flexibility to Pivot

With limited upfront visibility into emerging client challenges, top consultants remain agile, adaptive, and poised to alter course. We balance asking the right probing questions to unearth needs while avoiding so much discovery that progress stalls. Seasoned consultants pivot smoothly across industries and wear many hats fluidly, resisting over-specialisation. Comfort with ambiguity and appetite for variety distinguishes fantastic advisors.

Sophisticated Communication

Navigating complex social dynamics across C-suites and front line engineers alike demands nuanced communication, emotional intelligence and unwavering integrity. Beyond technical expertise, exceptional consultants influence through trust and relatability. Blending candour, empathy, humour and patience into tailored messaging for varied audiences is a key differentiator.

Intellectual Curiosity

The best consultants also stand out through unending curiosity. Understanding hidden root causes and nuanced contexts before surfacing solutions. Rather than reflexively force-fitting conventional wisdom, great advisors build creative insights through deep inquiry. There is invaluable skill in balancing thoroughness with pragmatism and strategic choice-making, which separates remarkable advisors.

Client Goal Alignment

Finally, the best consultants elevate client outcomes over personal agenda. Skilled advisors do tackle the vexing issues client partners may avoid internally. Often doing the "dirty work" is a genuine and effective way to build trust quickly. We align recommendations to desired business outcomes, guiding stakeholders through inevitable growing pains with transparency and compassion. Sometimes this means recommending they stop working with you, great consultants work to make themselves redundant.

Cultivating Great Consultants

Hopefully you now better understand the unique skills and mindsets that enable great consultants to deliver exponential value over time. It takes years of intentional practice across diverse challenges to cultivate capabilities like:

• Maintaining flexibility to pivot while resisting over-specialisation
• Blending sophisticated communication with emotional and social intelligence
• Channeling intellectual curiosity to unearth root causes and connections
• Aligning recommendations tightly to client goals for mutual success

For those interested in progressing on the journey to become an exceptional advisor, I highly recommend checking out the series of books I recommend here.

The value great consultants impart unfolds slowly then compounds over time. But clients must set the stage through transparency, commitment and integration. When aligned to shared purpose beyond surface outcomes, external experts can transform stagnation into momentum.