An Ordinary Day with the Client

Slalom Consultant David Van De Sompele's expertise includes performance tuning, production DBA activities, data modelling, ETL processes and reporting. He's based in Slalom's Seattle office.

If a day with the client is so ordinary, what is there to write about?  That is a fair question and the answer to it is the topic of this article.

Dictionary.com defines the word ordinary as: common, mediocre and unexceptional. But if that is the value you are delivering to your client then you should consider a career other than consulting. As consultants we specialize in various technologies and methodologies.  Blending this expertise with creativity and innovation, we help companies solve complex business and technological problems.  Over time this becomes ordinary to us – it’s what we do – but this ordinary effort from the consultant should look like an extraordinary effort from the client’s perspective.

On rare occasions you may be presented with a particularly challenging situation: uncharted waters, or an unpredictable fluke for which no one has the answer.  And as a senior consultant you must be willing to dig deep and bring the entire breadth of your professional experience to bear in order to solve the problem.  To better illustrate this I’ll relate a recent experience I had.  It was one of those situations in which everything seemed to be going well until a very strange situation occurred and I was asked to jump in and solve the issue. Read more of this post