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As someone who wants to help my customers understand the power of collaboration and the benefits it can bring if it’s embraced and acted upon, I wanted to undertake a very simple experiment that I could hold up as an example people could relate to. This came about because I come across many people who have the pre-conceived notion that free blogs are all about some 20-year-old writing about their week-end in Vegas (so much for what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!), rants of a personal nature, or entertainment related subjects. The perception is that blogs which post “serious” (e.g. technical) Q&A forums keep the answers under lock and key and you need to pay to get at the valuable answers.
And, let’s face it, a lot of free blogs are about self-promotion, so that is also a bit of a turn-off. But does that mean that what’s left are crumbs that aren’t worth your time? So I did a little experiment (sample of one!) and thought I’d incorporate a subject of interest these days as Microsoft’s SharePoint product exceeds the 100 million licenses deployed mark and people are starting to look at it for their own organizations.
Well, let me state the obvious, a sample of one experiment does not a scientific survey make! However, let me share with you the result of my test. I’ll spoil the ending – I was favorably surprised! Because our company sells SharePointbased applications and services, I wanted to get a better feel for what makes a good SharePoint consultant since a SharePoint consultant can make or break your SharePoint project. I went to LinkedIn, which is a social network (free to everyone) which is predominantly made up of professionals, and my question was going to be What do you look for in a SharePoint consultant? However, a quick search (which the system prompted me to do as I typed my question) revealed that someone had already asked that question in just slightly different words, which were “ What skills are you looking for when hiring/recruiting a SharePoint Consultant?” Well, that was efficient! The answers were already all compiled for me in one neat place – there were 10 of them at my fingertips at the time of writing. That was easy enough, but now the real test was to determine if the answers provided any real insight or if they were just flippant answers which I’ll call fluff.
And this is the part about being pleasantly surprised. Not one person captured all the elements of a comprehensive answer as you might find in a Harvard Business Journal, but each answer was a different perspective, succinct and insightful. When taken as a whole, in 10 answers we have an excellent composite profile of a good SharePoint Consultant. The answers weren’t “commercial”, they were all legitimate happy-to-help answers by professionals who freely took of their time to help other professionals they didn’t even know.
Let me share with you some of their wisdom, and I took the liberty to pepper this with some of my own thoughts as well.
- SharePoint is a platform and the breadth of what it can do means that no one individual could really have the depth required to master all aspects. Now that is a case for collaboration if I ever heard one, but I digress.
- A good consultant knows what he doesn’t know and will not put you in a blind-leading-the-blind situation. He will be upfront about the limits to his comfort zone and recommend rounding out his talents with contributions from others. He is usually well-connected or part of a company where he can count on others to collaborate with him.
- There is an important distinction to be made between a SharePoint consultant, a SharePoint developer, a SharePoint architect/designer, a SharePoint project/implementation specialist, and a SharePoint administrator. In effect, these are all related roles, but each has a different skill set. You need to know when you hire a SharePoint consultant, which of these roles you had in mind because perhaps your view of “consultant” encompasses the narrower definition as someone who is an extension of you and is primarily concerned with understanding the business requirement and ensuring that the right process, skills and metrics are in place to deliver on the stated objectives.
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