Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Working as a Consultant

Wearing many hats at work is what interest interest me with my job. Being a Consultant definitely provides that. Meeting clients, talking about their needs, identifying technology platform, designing the system and managing a development team are just about the things I've enjoyed doing.


Developing a system in-house for a client makes the development and management effort very interesting but I find there are two most critical things that needs to happen before a single code is written as shown below.
  • Validating verbal and written client's development platform
  • Knowing how your client's think, how your client's work, and what makes them happy.
Asking a client's system environment  is not enough to produce a product's platform development. One should consider validating the client's environment by developing a dummy framework built according the to their system specification. Try dropping that framework onto their server and start running some dummy test cases. This will validate the version of the programming language being used, modules installed, security restrictions and some unknown and known incompatibilities. Some client's environment are tightly secured even down to the smallest feature of an application and sometimes this is what makes developing/deploying an application difficult. Validating an environment by writing a sample framework is the surest way to know exactly the platform one should be developing on.

Now, another interesting thing to note is that when you understand who your clients are and how they think, it makes it a lot easier to work with them and  one can pretty much predict how the application should be designed and created. Carefully listen to what they need and how it should be incorporated to the application. The culture of the company reflects on their personality and this is what drives what they produce and use. A consultant should be able to identify and classify business functions that are most critical, important and least important. 

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