Consulting Skills for IT Professionals
Strengthening the soft skills of IT technicians
Why it works
We have all seen them: exceptionally strong technical consultants whom we wouldn’t dare put in front of clients. Why? In some cases, they were just too young or inexperienced and could not gain the client’s confidence. In other cases, they were brash, arrogant, or just plain condescending to clients. Often they couldn’t speak the client’s language or think in terms of the client’s needs. Today’s highly specialized business environments demand that information technology professionals be more than just skilled technicians. To become effective consultants, they need an entirely different set of competencies.
Learn how to
Consulting Skills for IT Professionals takes participants through the complete life cycle of a project to build their abilities to:
- Delineate client requests and ask key questions which help clients uncover their real needs
- Develop probing skills that isolate root causes and drill down to critical needs
- Set appropriate expectations with clients and manage those expectations throughout the project life cycle to avoid the expectations gap
- Adapt to the client and the four basic communication styles
- Use the four strategies for developing win-win solutions when disagreements occur
- Run focused and highly productive technical meetings
- Communicate effectively with clients about status, issues and challenges
- Develop and present convincing recommendations addressing key client objectives
- Apply the right processes through a comprehensive framework for all stages of the consulting process, from defining client needs to running a project and reviewing results
- Increase their credibility, improve their communication and build stronger relationships throughout the project life cycle.
Following the class, the 200-page manual serves as a tremendous resource to help participants increase their expertise with the various relationship management tools.
Ideal for
IT vice presidents and directors, systems and development managers, IT project managers, internal and external IT consultants, subject matter experts, and individuals whose roles require an IT consultative style.
Duration
3 days
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