Consultants
eaTeamWorks can make you a more effective, more profitable consultant. We know this: we're consultants too.
Written by consultants
We wrote the first part of the eaTeamWorks family – eaDocX – whilst working on consulting contracts with various clients, over a period of a few years. We refined our ideas, listened to what our clients were telling us, and then refined the products a bit more. Sometimes those clients were other modelers, but sometimes they were managers of those modelers – the people who actually paid our bills. So the eaTeamWorks products are not solving some abstract, theoretical problem – they are helping real consultants to be better, smarter and more employable, out there in the real world.
Consulting Engagement Requirements
Based on our years of being consultants, this is what we think a consultant needs to bear in mind as they arrive at a new client:
- Make an impression – fast
- Work within the system before you try to change it
- Deploy your previous experiences
- Leave your client self-sufficient – with no technical debt
- ..and better than they were before
- Don’t do boring stuff
Below are some ways to deliver against each of these requirements, using the tools and techniques of eaTeamWorks.
Make an Impression - Fast
As a consultant arriving at a new client, you always want to make a good impression. After all, you are probably costing the client much more money each day than their other employees, so they almost certainly expect you to deliver.
More insights, better quality, and faster.
- Get some of the modeling they have already done, find their current MS Word template, and create an eaDocX Quick Document. This will take their existing modeling, no matter how they have done it, and create some high-quality output, which looks like one of their own documents. This is a powerful first step – their EA content, delivered in their style.
- Find a document which they already have and add some EA content to it.
This takes a bit more effort, but is also a great next-step after you have dazzled them with a Quick Document. They probably can’t populate a whole document with content they have in EA already, but you might be able to replace some manual content with EA sourced content.
The important point is that this shows them how they can gradually replace manual content with EA model content, but at all times be ready to create new versions of the document. No big-bang approach – just a gradual replacement, adding more and more to their model. - Show them a Model Expert dashboard of some of their existing modeling, and discuss the results.
This a good way to start talking about model structure and consistency. How you can help them to make their models more consistent, and so more useful.
The measurements in a dashboard are some of the rules-of-thumb which we have used over the years when assessing a bit of modeling. If you have some better ones, let us know. - Especially show them a snapshot meta-model of part of their existing modeling. This is a view across their model which your client has probably not seen before – creating meta-models is not something people regularly do. So be prepared to explain what a meta-model is, and why it’s not especially scary, but useful. In fact, it’s essential for consistent modeling.
Work within your client's system before you try to change it
As consultants we are sometimes acting as a deliberate ‘agent of change‘. We are there to help the organization (or the modeling team) to change. (And maybe also to be the external people who can get blamed for anything bad about that change!)
It’s a consulting trick as old as time to:
- start that change from where they are now, but also
- show them that they have actually started to make the change already.
It’s important to respect the modeling work they have already done, and show how it can be improved and re-used.
Nobody wants to throw stuff away and start again, just because the new consultant says so. That's why most of the eaTeamWorks products start from where the customer is right now.
- eaDocX Quick Documents create documents by analyzing what they already have in their model, and trying to create a document from it. You’ll certainly get some kind of document, and you can then start a conversation about how to make it even better
- Quick documents also make use of the look and feel of their existing Word documents – using their own Word document templates – to make the documents look familiar. This is really important: a document which looks different – different colors, fonts, layout etc – will feel very different. One which looks like all the other documents they have seen before is immediately reassuring.
- Open a Model Expert snap-shot model, on a bit of modeling that they have already done, and use that as the basis for a Reference Model. You may need to make some changes to confirm it as a good modeling standard, but once you’ve done that, it’s ready to apply to any part of the model.
- eaSheets will help you to make large-scale model edits really quickly. And then you will have some modeling which you can validate, and get a zero-defect result.
- If your client is sending their documents to other people, hopefully they want to get feedback.
It’s tempting at this point to encourage them to use something like Prolaborate to get them interacting with their information consumers, but that’s a big step, and you only just arrived on their project.
Better to keep just using Word documents, and get them to add revisions and comments to them and send them back to you, just like they do already. You can then use Revision Manager to collate all that feedback. Or save an eaSheets spreadsheet in Excel, send that to your stakeholders so they can make changes. When they are ready, import their changes back into the model. See eaSheets Round trip editing
Maybe later you might mention that, if there are lots of people who need to see what’s in your models, then a real-time, curated view like Prolaborate might help. But leave that for later. Right now, work with what they know.
Deploy your Previous Experiences
The reason the client wants to employ you is because you have done some of this before. So demonstrate that by arriving on the project with some concrete deliverables.
One of the most efficient ways to do this is to collect Reference Models from previous projects. Unlike their underlying models, which are usually confidential to your previous client, the modeling style they used is probably not confidential. (check, obviously).
Showing a bunch of meta-models of how to, for example,
- implement a simplified style of BPMN process modeling, or
- Archimate Application Portfolio Management, or
- requirements management
..makes you look smarter, and stops your new client from inventing things which don’t need inventing.
Save and re-use standard ways to document EA elements
You might also keep some eaDocX document profiles from previous projects. These again are probably not confidential, because they just show how to present EA data in a useful, readable way, but without any document content.
Leave your client self-sufficient
If you leave your client with Model Expert reference models to help them to model better, and with eaDocX documents and eaSheets templates to deliver their model knowledge to their information consumers, then by the time you have finished, your client will be able to do all this without you.
This may seem like engineering your way into unemployment, but it’s a great message to tell your client at the start of an engagement. It says “it’s OK to pay lots of money now, because it won’t be forever.” And, because you’re good consultant, and keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll certainly be able to find more ways to help this client. If you want to.
One way to keep yourself in work with this client is to become a ‘forever consultant‘. The best way to do this is to avoid using any of these tools, and instead write loads of EA scripts – to do the same things that eaTeamWorks tools can do. Probably not as well as eaTeamWorks, but that just means you need to write more script.
A smart client will see this for what it is – you’re just creating technical debt for them.
Much better to say you’ll just use off-the-shelf tools which are supported by someone else, and concentrate on adding value higher up the food chain. Unless you really like writing scripts.
Better than Before
If you want to impress your new client, and so get more and better work, then remember: for the people in the organization who really matter, all they really care about is time, cost and quality.
If what you are doing for them doesn’t result in some combination of reduced costs and time, and improved quality, then don’t do it.
So if you create a document, it needs to be better than one they might create manually (this was #1 requirement for eaDocX, back in the 2000s). So show them how they can
- use all the features of Word to add table of contents and figures
- use Word table styles to make them easier to read
- add hyperlinks to let users browse around a document
- add a glossary which updates each time the document changes
All these features, and lots more, should let you create output documents which are:
- easier to read (reduces cost),
- have come from a model which you have validated (improved quality) and
- can be re-generated quickly (reduced time).
Any time you can re-use the knowledge that people already have then this also reduces costs and time. So if an information consumer likes spreadsheets, get eaSheets to create a spreadsheet for them.
And finally ... don't do Boring Stuff
Nobody likes to do boring stuff.
- Your client doesn’t want you to do it, because you cost a lot
- You don’t want to do it, because its …boring.
So use the tools to remove the boring stuff, so you can concentrate on the interesting stuff – working with stakeholders, helping your modelers to get better and better, and creating lots of content you can take to the next project.
Some quick wins
- Firstly, use eaSheets to make the maintenance and validation of EA data faster and more accurate.
- Using the Model Expert dashboard and snapshot meta-models, you can quickly assess new bits of modeling
- ..then use those snapshots to identify and fix issues really quickly and
- ..then use Reference Models to stop those issues from happening again.
Conclusions
If you have read this far, then you now have a super-fast way to make the most of the eaTeamWorks suite of tools to make you a
- more effective,
- more employable and
- more fulfilled EA consultant.
And next time we meet, if you say the code word ‘wibble’ to me, I’ll buy you a coffee.
And if you haven’t read this far, then you missed a free drink.
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