I, Consultant

On Friday I had an odd day at the Client: I was involved in 4 meetings, none of which were directly related to my stated "job", but all of which I wound up having a major role in. Each invite was the result of me asking "why".

In one case, my project was tangentially affected by an infrastructure issue from the night before. I read and reread the explanation of the outage, and wrote up a series of questions to get to the truth - what they were saying was not complete. Not that it really affected me, and getting the answer was NOT my job, but I didn't like the fact that the answers weren't being provided in a straightforward manner.

So I asked the questions, and it led to a full scale "lessons learned" meeting, in which all the geeks came together and hey, figured out that there really WAS a problem that needed to be addressed, and gosh, why hadn't they seen that? And maybe they would have done it anyway, but I felt like I had a part in helping them get to the root of their issue.

In the other meetings, it was a case where I was a participant in a larger meeting and a parallel team raised an issue. Again, completely outside of what my job is, but I had some ideas, and I offered them up. And suddenly, I've been invited to a work session to hammer out the problem.

I'm beginning to remember that THIS is some of the extra value I tend to bring to a client - I don't stay in my role - I always ask questions, I'm always curious about the big picture. This is how I rose from managing one hospital's rollout to leading the enterprise project at the last client. This is how I became the "consultant at large" for 4 years at the other last client. This is how I went from business analyst to department director at the insurance company years ago.

And as I sit with other people I realize that many of my peers as "consultants" do NOT have this tendency. The example I saw on Thursday - I was in a group of 5, one turned to me to tell me more details about a Japanese website I had shown him. We spoke about it for 2-3 minutes, and the other 3 people just sat there and waited for us to be done. None asked for background or details on what we were discussing. It's not the first time. I don't think I'm a buttinsky or terribly nosy, but if people are talking about something and I'm at the table, I usually want to know what they're talking about. To not be curious is just alien to me.

As you're aware, I've had some issues finding my "ground" at this client, and I'm still not sure that it's going to be a long lasting gig, but this week, I really started feeling myself "connecting" at the level that makes me most comfortable - getting involved with the larger picture, sharing my thoughts outside of what I'm "supposed" to be responsible for... Though to be perfectly clear, I am also focused on my "job", and am executing on it very well.

It was a strange moment of clarity on Friday, as if I was looking at myself and my behavior from the outside and I got a glimpse at one of my driving mechanisms - like seeing a pocket watch with the back off of it. And perhaps I'm describing something totally obvious to those who know me...

But I wanted to write it down.