The real joy of consulting

 Aside  No Responses »
Nov 162010
 

Consulting isn’t the glamour job that a lot of people think it is. Sure, you may get to travel and learn new things, but as anyone who travels a lot will tell you, it can be a bit wearing after a while, and you find yourself suddenly hankering for the most basic of simple meals after weeks at a time of hotel or restaurant food.

Nor do you do consulting for the fame. Sure, good consultants will get reputations in their fields, but we’re hardly household names (except maybe in particularly niche/geeky households). Undoubtedly I think the best consultants start with a passion for their field and a desire to learn as much as possible, but this will only get you so far. There needs to be something else to prevent burn out and to allow for personal growth.

I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to develop and keep long term customer relationships, carrying customers between my last company (which collapsed) and my current company, and equally having customers carry those relationships with me from one company to the next. At one level, they remain customers – but at another, as you’ve been working with certain customers year in, year out, you realise that the true value of consulting is the people you’re doing the consulting for. It’s not about being able to solve problems and challenges for companies that you deal with, it’s about being able to solve problems and challenges for the individual people you deal with. The first just pays the bills; the second one is what gives you the job satisfaction.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had a few people I’ve been working with for years advise me that they’re moving on to other endeavours. It’s always at this time that I pause to think about the core reason I do this job: to help people.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 06:39  Tagged with: , ,

Backup does not suck

 Backup theory  1 Response »
Aug 272009
 

It’s a common misconception that, well, backup sucks. This for the most part seems to come from one of three sources: misunderstandings, issues, or vendors trying to sell you some New and Shiny Thing.

Invariably when someone tells me that backup sucks, it isn’t backup that sucks, it’s the design, implementation or processes at their site that … ahem, suck. Perhaps more so than any other function of IT, backup lends itself most to rigorous procedural implementation. If you think this is why it sucks, I’d suggest that you’re not thinking of the benefits of such processes.

These benefits are:

  1. Predictability: You know, with absolute certainty, what the end results should be of backup activities, every single day. (Successful recovery from a successful backup.)
  2. Task management: Only exceptions require additional task management; all other functions are sufficiently routine as to allow standard operational guidelines.
  3. You know today, you know tomorrow: Not only do you have a good sense of direction in your day to day activities, you also know many of your long term goals as a matter of fact (capacity planning, reporting, etc.)
  4. Be the hero: That may sound petty, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing that your work helps to ensure the company survives in the event of a failure. This is a great cause for job satisfaction.
  5. Problem solving: OK, all of IT gets to work in problem solving, but problem solving in backup environments is one of immense satisfaction; you get to take something that’s not working, and not only fix it, but fix it to ensure recoverability.
  6. Breadth of access and experience: In a heterogeneous environment, a backup administrator gets to work with a very broad scope of operating systems, applications, databases, etc.

Personally, I think this represents great scope for job satisfaction! So let me suggest again – if you think that backup sucks, maybe that means there’s scope to improve things: the design, or the implementation, or the procedures. The job however should be immensely rewarding.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 07:22  Tagged with:
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