Who is an IT Consultant on this Forum?

Network_Engineer

Curious, as to who is working as a IT Consultant. What is your opinion of IT consulting?

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RouteMyPacket

Network_Engineer wrote: »

Curious, as to who is working as a IT Consultant. What is your opinion of IT consulting?

I am back in a consulting role.

Consulting varies but if you land a role that has you supporting multiple clients then through supporting varied environments you gain a lot of experience in dealing with a wide array of situations.

I consult on site for one big client, in these types of consulting roles you are onsite everyday and I never see my firms office. The only reason I know I work for them is my paycheck.

QHalo

I bet it_consultant is.

Drovor

QHalo wrote: »

I bet it_consultant is.

Not exactly

http://www.techexams.net/forums/jobs-degrees/75366-it_no-longer-consultant.html

QHalo

False Advertising!

sieff

I'm a consultant. I love everything about it. Haven't been to the office regularly in 2 years. I'm normally at client sites, supporting remotely from home or doing some travel. Biggest perk is schedule flexibility.

paul78

I miss consulting and I would love to get back into it. Getting the contracts was always the tough part for me and also caused me some anxiety by not knowing where my next customer was coming from. That was really the only reason why I gave it up. I personally would enjoy working for myself again. It's carries it's risks, but I did enjoy the feeling that I was "getting stuff done" and not getting caught up in the drama of office politics, etc. is a big plus.

it_consultant

QHalo wrote: »

False Advertising!

I know, I need to change my thing. I still do some jobs on the side. It is like an addiction.

ptilsen

Used to. I switched about five months after it_consultant for similar reasons. Actually, I got a pay increase and work less hours, commute less, drive to far-away sites less. More air travel, but that's free frequent flyer miles and I actually don't mind it that much.

paul78

BTW - were you guys independent consultants or did you work with a staffing firm or consulting company? I'm curious what you did to sell. Selling my services was always my weak area.

ptilsen

I worked for a firm. I do a bit on the side, but it's really not my thing. I mean, I like being paid by the hour and paid well at that, and I liked certain consulting aspects, but I don't like sales. In fact, for me, it's important that the solution I provide is the most logical for the business. Divorcing that from the profit motive is hard even as an independent, and almost impossible when working for a firm. What I like about doing that as an employee rather than a consultant is that the business' profit motive is aligned with mine (I am a shareholder). There are downsides, but overall it's a better environment.

When I did become involved in sales, I left the sales guy handle the sales aspect. My impact would be to demonstrate confidence in the solutions we could provide and explain the technical how and why of it all in a comprehensible manner for the customer, just as I do as an employee. Business interests me, but sales is just not my cup of tea.

kalebksp

I work for a VAR doing pre and post sales. It would be difficult for me to go back to in house IT. This week I deployed a FlexPod (Cisco UCS/Nexus + NetApp + VMware) and migrated an office from CME to CUCM. I've probably worked on over a hundred NetApp (plus the occasional EMC or Equallogic), setup dozens of VMware environments, built/migrated many Exchange servers, plus Active Directory and other miscellaneous work. Many of the things I do you might get to do once in a regular shop (how often do you do a controller swap on a storage system?) but I get to do them all the time. Helps keep things interesting.

[BTW, if anyone is interested in this sort of work in the Anchorage, Alaska area shoot me a PM. My employer is always looking for good people.]

Claymoore

I am a consultant as well. I worked for a consulting firm that folded after the dotcom crash, went to work in internal IT for several years, and then went back to consulting when I felt I was no longer being challenged. I have been consulting for about the last 4 years, and with my current company for 18 months.

Consulting isn't for everyone. Here are some of my Pros and Cons, a few of which are both a pro and a con.

Pro

You can dive deep into a technology. I prefer to work with Exchange and I can do several migrations in a year, instead of several years between migrations.
You can work on some big implementations. 15,000 workstations migrated to Win7 for one client, for example. If my schedule holds through the rest of the year, I will have sync'd 800,000 AD objects to Office 365 with 100,000 mailboxes being migrated.
Multiple clients. Everyone implements and breaks things a little different
Latest technology. We have deployed several products in the TAP program with Microsoft
IT as a profit center instead of a cost center. Pay is better, training is required instead of a perk, and you are treated like a rock star - or at least a professional - instead of a red-headed stepchild.
Consulting is sales. Presentations, proposals, RFPs and SOWs. Working on a $12 million RFP sounds fun until you give up 3 weeks of your life to it. But there's nothing like the feeling of closing a deal, no matter how small.
No politics. As long as it doesn't impact my deliverables, I really don't care that a couple of managers don't get along.
No budgets. If they didn't have a budget for the project, I wouldn't be there.

Con

Travel. This could be it's own post
You build it but don't manage it. I'll build the servers, perform a pilot migration, and then go to the next client. I don't migrate all the mailboxes or participate in the daily care and feeding of Exchange.
Little down time. Not just bench time between billable gigs, but no down time during the day. I may be sitting in a conference room presenting to a group of people for a week. No time to stop and check TE when your laptop is connected to the projector.
High visibility. When you make a mistake everyone knows about it.

spicy ahi

How does one break into consulting? I've looked at it from afar but haven't really looked into it. Although every time I go to some training class or talk to sales engineers presenting their product to me they always comment that I'd be a good fit for that line of work. I laugh it off but lately it has looked appealing...

Shockwave29361

Agreed with Claymoore. I did DoD consulting with Symantec products for the last three years and all of that applies. The difference with me is that I worked in a two-man team with a sales engineer that took care of the SoW, proposals, and all that. Number 2 under Con hits home with me because I like to see a system fully implemented and used but with the time I was given, I could only get the product installed, have a baseline configured, and do a knowledge transfer. This usually left the client not knowing what they really have and just letting the system take care of itself. As far as high visibility; there is nothing worse than giving a presentation with this shiny new product you just installed and configured and having an error or warning pop up on the screen. If you've ever tried to change something on a DoD network(SIPR), you'll find out real fast that it hates anything and everything that you change.

stlsmoore

Great thread, like spicy ahi mentioned I'm really curious how someone breaks into consulting, specifically doing it independently? My guess so far is that you get to the top of your career, work for a VAR for a while, and then move a way to your own once you've got the sales and implementation nailed down.

it_consultant

stlsmoore wrote: »

Great thread, like spicy ahi mentioned I'm really curious how someone breaks into consulting, specifically doing it independently? My guess so far is that you get to the top of your career, work for a VAR for a while, and then move a way to your own once you've got the sales and implementation nailed down.

Doing it independently is really hard if you haven't worked in a firm, consulting is another animal. Many IT jobs out there are consulting gigs. There are a lot of jobs open because frankly, many IT guys can't hack it. Once you get a few years of consulting under your belt, assuming you haven't left the industry or checked in to a mental health hospital, getting a job will not be a challenge.

My current gig is an 18 month MAX kind of job. Once I am dong swapping their switches from HP to Brocade I will start looking around. I am keeping some jobs on the side and one of the other admins in my office has a client which is growing quite large. I am doing a Hyper-V 2012 implementation for them next month over a weekend.

My best advice is to let go of all of your preconceptions about how things should be set up. You will walk into totally messed up networks and once you start pointing out everything you would do differently, they will become insulted and that is a bad way to start out a relationship. Become OK wth being lied too. Clients either lie because they don't know any better or they are embarrassed. Ignore it or bring it up gently if it needs to be addressed.

sieff

Claymoore wrote: »

[*]High visibility. When you make a mistake everyone knows about it.
[/LIST]

This is a big one. There's little tolerance for errors on the job. You're perceived as the expert. Any hardware or software component not included in the sale or design flaw you're responsible for it. I've been blamed for issues that were not my fault several times, however, the reasoning is "your the engineer, you're supposed to catch that" ... high-stress some times, but the downtime totally makes up for it.

paul78

stlsmoore wrote: »

I'm really curious how someone breaks into consulting, specifically doing it independently?

When I did it a long time ago, I suppose I wasn't that thoughtful about it. I basically just quit my job and started to make calls to my business network. I was only an independent consultant for about 2-3 years. As I recall, getting the business stuff together wasn't too bad; my biggest administrative challenge was finding affordable business liability insurance.

The ongoing challenge was the constant need to be on the lookout for opportunities. Most of my work was project management or software design related.

From a cont

Darthn3ss

You build it but don't manage it. I'll build the servers, perform a pilot migration, and then go to the next client. I don't migrate all the mailboxes or participate in the daily care and feeding of Exchange.

Sounds like more of a pro to me.

Where do I sign up?