How to Consistently Deliver High-Quality Deliverables

To become a successful / highly sought-after consultant you must be able to CONSISTENTLY deliver high-quality deliverables to your clients. While you may have needed skills to do so, other factors may prevent you from doing this consistently. Unfortunately, often times a great job goes unnoticed, however, a bad job usually receives more attention than it deserves, and this may easily destroy your reputation that it took you a long time to build. We wish to share here a few tips that we teach our mentees in order for them to constantly deliver high-quality deliverables for their clients:

?1)????PAYING ATTENTION TO DETAILS

What do I mean by this? To know what needs to be done and how the client needs it done, you must pay attention to what is being communicated by the client. What needs to be done will be communicated throughout the assignment and at times in a very subtle way that it can be easily missed. What needs be done will be communicated in many ways e.g., via emails, via meetings and even via unofficial chats. The only way to capture and remember all that need be done is by having a place where it can be noted immediately after being communicated. At CSK, it our culture to have a dedicated word document labelled “key notes” for every assignment that we use to note all the “what’s” and “how’s” whenever they are being communicated by our clients. Throughout assignment implementation, keep checking whether all the ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ are being addressed.

?Also, always remember that no matter your level of knowledge and skills, it NOT WHAT YOU THINK needs be done or how you think it needs be done but what YOUR CLIENT think needs be done and how YOUR CLIENT think it should be done! As a consultant, you can only play an advisory but not decision making role!

?2)????HAVING NEEDED SKILLS

This goes without saying. For every assignment, you must evaluate yourself whether you have the needed skills to do it and deliver high quality work, and if you don’t, just don’t accept it, unless you feel you have sufficient time to learn the needed skills. With the current wide access to information, anything can be learned, but this must be done very careful.

?3)????LEARN TO SAY NO

Learning to say NO is perhaps the most important skill you need to develop if you want to succeed as a consultant, as it may quickly result into losing your reputation as well as job opportunities. One mistake that many consultants make is accepting too many assignments at once, which in turn limits their ability to give enough attention to each. This often result in things like copying and pasting from previous assignments or delegating some aspects of the assignment to individuals who may not be well-equipped with needed skills to perform assigned tasks. ?Also, say NO if you feel you don’t have needed skills.

?4)????WILLINGNESS TO READ, LEARN & UNLEARN

Strong familiarity with the phenomena/topic under the study as well as the setting, is a pre-requisite for high-quality research, hence, every assignment will require some reading from your side. ?Your clients will often share various study-related materials and you MUST make time to read them. You may also need to search for more information to inform the various aspect of your study implementation. All in all, you must develop a reading hobby as it is the only way if you want to succeed as a consultant. Unfortunately, as a research consultant, you may be working on new topics many times, which will require reading from your side.

Unlearning is also critical for consultants—the process/ability to discard outdated knowledge and practices. While it is true that some of the unlearning happens spontaneously as part of the learning process, it is worthy to deal with it distinctively. As Alvin Toffler once noted, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” As consultants, we should also strive for learning to unlearn (This paragraph was an addition from @ Kapongola Nganyanyuka (PhD).?