As most of you active consultants know; the act of forgiving and mentioning real 'fixes' to infrastructure comes as a hidden danger for most.
Why should we ourselves be concerned? When expression flows forth from ego, one should be fore-warned that perhaps sitting opposite you is an information 'sponge', ready, willing and able to suck out your best knowledge and performance; waiting to applying this new found wealth of Business Intelligence to a foreign infrastructure. Most consultants get paid...I didn't.
A large aerospace manufacturer and senior executive called me in and asked for my input to a problem he was having. Still manually inputting invoices and change orders is unheard of but there it was, starring me in the face.
I was as usual enthusiastic, and lent my expertise, happy to do so, hoping to get the contract - you know how that goes. After following the designs on the board; asking for clarifications, I came up with several solutions. But remember, never dive into the fixes at first - we might forget the details - right? Data Servers, Programmer, Project Management Manager, PMBOK, Sigma Six and SAP Netweaver were mentioned by me.
OK! So here exists an opportunity waiting. I give him the high-level, changed the diagram a bit - never mentioning the details - but expressing these infrastructure changes in marketing terminology.
Call back - as I am told to do so. He says, my solution is too expensive and decides to go with something else. Oh??!!
Sure, I said to myself - he's applying the band-aid, just to fix his own problem and the hell with the other managers and the enterprise infrastructure. Pretty soon - the other's are going to scquak like chickens. He's just built a mess, a costly inefficient mess.
Gee gosh - by golly, I feel better all ready!!!
Till then...
