Trusted Advisory

To be successful in IT Advisory and IT Consulting, you can invest in marketing, have the lowest prices, be the biggest IT Advisory company in the world, but there’s a skill set you may never leave your desks without, and that’s becoming a trusted advisor for your client.
Being a trusted advisor to anyone or any entity requires a specific set of characteristics. This is true for both, private and business relationships. Each of the characteristics can have many examples, but for the length of this article I am limiting myself to mostly just one.

Main characteristics

These are the essentials, that need to be developed above average to get ahead in the trusted advisory field of choice.

Understanding

To give meaningful advice, one has to first understand what the main problems are, and not just rely on what they are told to do. The reason behind that is very simple: If the advice or measures won’t fix the underlying issue(s), you, the advisor, will be responsible. It is your field of expertise, you need to trust your client, but it’s called „trust, but verify“ for a reason.

Honesty

To not only be an advisor, but a trusted one, your clients need to be convinced you’re worth trusting. One part is the provided value, but another important one is to communicate the limits of your knowledge. For example, if you don’t know something, say so. Refer to experts you know, and get back to the client either with them, or after you had a chance to circle back from them. These situations, while they can be annoying or lessen your confidence, build trust with clients (that are actually worth keeping) because if you do have the skill set and answers ready, they can be sure, that if they weren’t, you would say so.

Transparency

Being transparent is a good skill to have anyway, but maybe one of the least common one and overlooked more often than not. Have you ever heard nothing from a conversation in weeks? Applications, project communication, anything you can imagine, just to hear back after a long waiting period, which got blame-shifted to waiting for person/team XYZ in the process? Transparency means communicating proactively if:

• something needs to be done first
• someone needs to be reached and is unavailable and so forth. Also: if someone is on vacation, it doesn’t hurt telling your clients in advance that you have OOO time scheduled. If they circle back to you being surprised wit an OOO notice is really no good practice.

Business ethics

In IT projects (more on projects soon…!), you have a set of best practices in mind, and those may vary on your specialization. However, documentation could be considered a common ground for many / most of them. If you need to offer those, do so. How your client feels about those should be irrelevant. Skipping this best practice to satisfy your client’s pricing expectations, is a risky gamble that can backfire if it’ll fall on their feet years down the line – or just after your work is done.

Integrity

You may have all the mentioned practices memorized and on lock. But sometimes you will need to defend some of them to not compromise your integrity. I have had requests for cloud migrations where as for instance the customer had no plan of how to operate their services once migrated to the cloud – and my company didn’t have any plans or offerings for Cloud Operations. I had to reject that project request, because while it could have solved some technical challenges, it would have created an organizational challenge that was even harder to solve, because the skill set needed was way too rare to find at the time, compared to the current issue(s). Understanding the underlying issues was absolutely necessary here as well.

Accountability

You will give advice that is tailored on your understanding of the requirements and the possible solutions AT THAT TIME. Sometimes you are going to learn more about the requirements, or maybe about new tech to solve the issues in a different way. And you need to be willing to be accountable for that, communicate the new developments transparently, and possibly readjust your approach to the solutions that are being presented by you. People are very much used to working with people that don’t, so you can be the fixer that actually solves the problem, once you’re on the team.

Self-confidence

Managing all of the above is not for the faint of heart. Some of those only go well together, like honesty is worth little more than dishonesty, when you’re not being proactive about it. Not coming forth because no one asked you to is just as bad as having said nothing at all or even given bad advice. The confidence needed comes pretty easy if you can honestly say, “I did everything of the above, therefore I’m pretty much content with the way I provided my service.”

Bonus: optional for high performers

Authenticity

While not a strict requirement, if you believe in how you approach things, this may seem as a given, but I am going to mention it regardless. Don’t try to play a role, that you’re not. Fake it till you make it was yesterday, and you will be called out for it. Or maybe if not, some of your clients will just realize that you’re just blowing hot air, and when you’re constantly unsure if you’re playing that role, you’re less energized to stay ahead of your tasks and this will introduce unnecessary stress.

Stress resistance

Committing to accountability and solution-providing can sometimes be a bit taxing, and when you find yourself in a problem-solving or even crisis-mode, it’s best you at least know how your stress response is going to look like. Do you have a team or work alone? Are you fixing it or is it just to delegate to someone else? A bit of stress resistance is not only helpful, sometimes it’s necessary, but that comes with the role. Also: Solving whatever situation is causing it brings a reward that can boost you to the next level even. That brings me to…:

Problem solving skills

If you’re the one fixing things, the general problem-solver traits are being used (more on that maybe soon…). You should know at this point if you’re a solver or delegator / constructive lead, so I won’t go into much detail.

Intrinsic motivation

Why do you want this? For me it’s getting into the win-win-win zone. I am happy when the client is happy, and lastly my company (if working for one) is happy too. And yes, in that order. For you it may be entirely different, maybe you identify with some of the social engagements, or sustainability, medical innovations or what have you.
And while not 100% necessary, it may help you keeping it up, if you know what yours is. In combination, they may lead to…:

KAIZEN

Or KVP or continuous improvement processes. You know of postmortems? If not, then I’ll simplify it, for any given process that had a negative outcome, you may or may not think about something during the process that could have helped prevent it turning out the way it did. If someone is willing to go into the nitty-gritty details to improve the process like modifying it, creating checklists, blueprints, white-papers, there is no time to waste, and jump right into it. Time is of the essence here, because our memory fades and we tend – and sometimes like to forget – our failures. This is just human behavior, but if it can help you in the future, there’s no reason to skip it. Challenges will be getting all stakeholders’ time and motivation to do so and recapping it without throwing accusations and blame around. The goal is not to identify who messed up, but how to change the process to improve the success rate for the future, and you need a good culture that allows for that to bring maximum value.

Conclusion

IT Advisory may one of the most intriguing skill sets one could have in the current date, as there’s a boatload of IT transformation strategies and technologies available, and many companies struggle with the prioritization and selection of projects where to start. However, If you bring all of the above into the mix, you should be able to thrive in a role that allows for that. Luckily, there’s room for trusted advisors in almost any kind of project work, and it’s not limited to software projects for example.

Good luck!