The IT Consultancy Survival Guide

Introduction

It hit me in Chennai airport. I had just arrived from London to work on a multi-billion dollar international IT project. Giddy from jet lag, I looked for my name in the throng of sign-waving drivers in the arrivals hall. The airport transportation manager approached me.

Mr Wood? Your driver is through this door.

In the middle of one of India's busiest airports, I was recognised and escorted into a waiting car for the drive into the city. I'm not a rock star, nor a supermodel. I'm not a social media personality and my face has not graced the cover of any magazines.  Why was I recognised as someone special by an airport manager who sees thousands of travellers every day? The answer is surprising: I worked for an international IT Consultancy. This alone, apparently, made me a VIP worthy of special attention.

IT consultancies are big business around the globe. You may have seen advertisements for IT consultancies at sporting events or in airports and in business media. Accenture, CapGemini, Fujitsu, IBM, Infosys, PwC, CGI, TCS, HP, DXC and Atos are but a few of these global giants. You may have noticed well-groomed executives racing through airports or conferring on mobile phones in exclusive restaurants. While this may look exciting, anyone considering a career in one of these consultancies may want to take a deeper look at the realities of daily life in this line of work.

In my IT career, I’ve managed to work for, or alongside, most of the big name IT consultancies. I've also worked for few boutique consultancies and in several countries. In this book, I’ve attempted to describe what advice I would give a friend considering working for one of the glamorous big names in IT consulting. I aim to explain the inner workings of how major IT consultancies operate, warts and all, and to offer advice on how to work effectively within and alongside them. Now that I've stepped away from the life, I can offer some opinions on how to survive and thrive in the IT consultancy world.

I'll explain how to get hired, how to stay in the job, how to raise your profile to get interesting assignments, how to live well on the road and how to become an indispensable asset to your employers. Along the way I'll describe how IT consultancies operate, a few of the pitfalls to avoid, how to impress clients and some ways to succeed at project work while maintaining a semblance of a work-life balance.

As way of a disclaimer: I am not a professional writer. I must apologise in advance for my dubious attempts at humour and drifts into consultant-speak. It's ingrained in me after so many years of writing reports. Although limited to what I can say by the many non-disclosure agreements I've signed with clients and employers, I can go into quite a lot of detail in exposing the more dubious aspects of the IT consultancy industry as a whole.

IT consultancy is not for everyone. You can get lost in bureaucracy, exploited by clients and ignored by a dense management structure. However, you can also make staggering leaps in advancement in a short space of time, work on state-of-the-art technology for some of the biggest names in business world and travel the globe on an expense account. Who knows, you just might be recognised in a busy airport.

A day in the life of an IT consultant

BEFORE I DESCRIBE HOW to succeed, perhaps it would help to describe a ‘typical day’ of an IT consultant. Of course, the whole point of working as a consultant is that there are no typical days. Nevertheless, a pattern does develop, especially on long projects.

Let’s set the scene: you are a junior manager assigned to work for a systems integration project. The IT consultancy you work for has been hired by a big name company to implement a new system and interface it into the existing infrastructure. The project is scheduled to take about a year to complete. The team you are working with are a few dozen IT professionals, a mix of fellow consultants and existing client staff. The place you are working is the headquarters of the client, which is about 300 miles from your home. You travel to the client site on a Monday morning and stay in a hotel across town. You’ve been working on this project for about three months. It’s behind schedule. The pressure is on. Today is a typical Tuesday.

The alarm goes off in your hotel room at 7am. Despite staying in the same hotel for four nights a week over the last three months, you have a ‘where am I’ start as you look around the unfamiliar surroundings. You go about your usual morning routine paying careful attention to getting dressed.  You need to look sharp every day. At about 7:45, you wander out of the room leaving your luggage as you will return that night. You join the throng of business travellers in the breakfast room of the hotel where you avoid the fried foods as you’ve been noticing the pounds pile on from the constant dining out. You sit with a co-worker who’s also staying at the same hotel and make idle comments about the project you both are working on over toast and coffee. At 8:15, you grab your laptop bag and travel to the client site via a taxi, saving the receipt.

At 8:45, you are at one of the hot-desks secured for your team. This is a disused meeting room with a few extra tables added. Half a dozen people cram into the room throughout the day so it gets quite uncomfortable. You are told it’s temporary until they can find more room, but they’ve been saying that for the last couple of months. You fiddle with the WAN connection into your laptop and run through the login procedure to get into your IT consultancy’s network. Your first email queue fills up with consultancy messages. Fellow consultants demand your input on issues at other projects; a reminder that your expenses are overdue; HR need you to sort out that interview date; your consultancy boss needs your input into a major proposal for a potential huge new client; and one of your staff has sent a heartfelt cry for help with a personal problem that is impacting her performance. You spend thirty minutes answering these emails as you prioritize your client work for the day. Your co-workers fill the disused meeting room with coffee steam and project gossip. You print out the work you did last night.

Grabbing your printouts, you sprint to the project war room for the daily status meeting at 9:30. You have prepared for this the night before. This meeting is hostile as the client is unhappy the project is running late. You cannot be passive; you dive in with well-thought-out suggestions for overcoming immediate obstacles. The client staff you work alongside are keen to blame your consultancy for all problems, including problems they have caused, but you have to keep your cool. Using your prepared facts and non-emotive language, you push forward your agenda in a calm and confident manner. You work to find the underlying cause of any conflict with individuals and resolve them, obsequiously, if required.

After the meeting, you push on with your to-do list. You take time every day to meet with your counterpart in the client site hierarchy to have a semi personal chat. You nurture this relationship for project, not personal reasons. You gently pump your counterpart for project-related information, focusing on perceived client concerns and questions. You are interested in finding out problems before they occur in order to prepare responses to concerns before they are stated.

A consultant and the team are an invading force into a pre-existing client work culture. There are resentments and politics that affect how the client staff deal with you and your colleagues. This is constant, baffling and exasperating. Nevertheless, it’s part of the job.

The rest of the morning is spent having informal one-to-one conversations with the team and client staff to identify to resolve problems and push the project forward. You have to log into your assigned client email account to deal with the dozens of messages there. Each response on this email system has to be carefully measured before you send anything. The slightest hint of controversy has you running to your superior for advice before you hit send.

At lunch, you meet up with the senior IT consultancy staff on-site to catch up. In hushed tones sat a quiet corner of the office, the project manager tells you about funding problems while the account manager gets animated about the concerns the client has with the project. Your job just got harder with more difficult-to-meet deadlines and a cut in budget. A sandwich gobbled back at your hot desk in the cramped meeting room keeps you going.

In the afternoon, it’s more pressured meetings with the techies who give you bad news about the software package not interfacing with the client software. The user acceptance people are struggling with the lack of specific requirements that are supposed to be supplied by the client. You devise work-a-rounds to get the teams progressing while the problems are addressed. You delegate and escalate as best you can. You work at team morale by trying to interject a laugh or two with mixed results. You have a couple of one-to-ones with the IT consultancy staff who are struggling. You coach them in the right direction and help with their interpersonal skills.

Your mobile rings for the fifteenth time today. This time you are dumped into a conference call set up by a senior person in your IT consultancy and half a dozen experts dialling in from around the globe. You are on the spot to give your in-depth thoughts on the technical details of a project you worked on a few months earlier. The assembled conference call experts quiz you in detail as they are struggling on a similar project. The senior IT consultant tries to get you to drop what you are doing and join this new project in another part of the country. You refer them to your current project manager.

Winding down for the evening, you finish your emails as best you can with a few casual conversations with client staff and your colleagues. You prep for the following morning’s status meeting, as you always need to stay one-step ahead. At 6:30 or so, you look around the deserted office. You slip away for the evening.

At about 7:30 you’re back at the hotel, laptop open and dialled into the IT consultancy network. You change into comfortable clothes and deal with your current work issues. You contribute to another proposal your boss is putting forward to another client. A colleague you worked with a year before is asking for help with a document he’s writing. You do a little work on the addition you’ll need to make to your company’s knowledge base.

You get a message from one of your colleagues in the hotel bar. You put your never-ending tasks on hold for dinner. Meeting in the hotel bar, you go out with a couple of colleagues to a nearby restaurant. You’ve already eaten in the hotel restaurant and several other places many times in the previous weeks and months. The colleagues are full of project gossip and you exchange information on how the consultancy is doing. After dinner, you are taken aside by someone on your team who confesses that she’s having problems at home. You commiserate and try to work out a way around the current issues. You also make a mental note that you may need to seek a replacement for her if she leaves the project.

Back at the hotel at 10pm, you call your spouse for a catch up, trying to help with life back home. It’s the usual: bills to pay, family squabbles to sort out over the weekend. You log back into the laptop and enter your expenses while zoning out in front of the TV. You sleep fitfully in the unfamiliar hotel bed before you start all over again tomorrow.

Does this sound like how you want to earn a living? Certainly, some days are better and some are worse. You' might work from home for a few days. Other times you're working in different time zones where sleep is a luxury scheduled into your daily planner. The job is a question of dynamics. There are amazing highs and lows. You can leverage your situation to become a global leader in your IT niche where you are speaking at conferences around the world. This can be followed by a two-month stint in the most depressing industrial client site imaginable. Learning how to accept the rough with the smooth is part of the job.

Be careful what you wish for as it might come true.

What are IT consultancies?

An IT consultancy is a company that sells computer or information technology-based professional services. These professional services come in the form of people who sort out a customer’s specific IT needs. The IT consultancy can be an arm of a larger organisation that also