Business Productivity Posts
As a technical consultant, do you sometimes struggle when it comes to consulting a client.
photo credit: Lars Plougmann
Some clients would complain when they don’t understand your technical jargons. They would say that you’re being too technical and trying to confuse them further with your tech talk.
But being a technical person, we can understand that it’s easier to mention ITIL than Information Technology Infrastructure Library or to mention ERP than to Enterprise Resource Planning.
Whether you’re a technical consultant or a business consultant, I strongly believe that consulting is a skill which can be acquired and mastered by learning the fundamentals, best practices and common mistakes made by consultants.
I remember once our Managing Consultant told us to never say these 3 words to the client: “I don’t know”. Because once mentioned, the credibility is gone. Instead there are many ways to let the client know that you’re not very sure on a particular topic area and would rather not comment.
These are some examples:
- With some additional research, I can get back to you with a better explanation… Or
- Our consultants have experienced this before, perhaps I could arrange for us to meet…
Some would say that most consultants are trying to confuse instead of consult. Whatever it is, consultants can get the right consulting skills to enhance their credibility and gain the right consulting methodologies.
If you’re currently a working consultant, attending classes right after work could be a hassle.
Instead you could op for online business training such as those offered by BusinessTraining.com Continue Reading »
Online Business Training Programs
A few days ago while using my 1-year-old DELL Inspiron 1420 notebook, the alphabet letter ‘L’ seemed stuck and there’s just no way I could press on it. Image by striatic.
It feels as if there’s something stuck underneath the keypad which is stopping it from being pressed.
It’s really annoying because there’s just no way I could type the letter ‘L’. The only thing I could think of is to replace ‘l’ with ‘1′. Hopefully people just wont notice it.
I was thinking to myself, I need to report this to DELL about this tomorrow.
The next day, something strange happened! The letter ‘L’ can be pressed on but not the number ‘0′ (zero). So I thought, well it’s ok since I seldom type on zeroes anyway. I didn’t call DELL and continue working on the notebook as usual.
But on the following day, the zero keypad worked but not the letter ‘O’!
Arggh….. this is really super annoying. Now, even as I’m writing today’s post, I’m struggling to type effectively. Although it’s still possible to type the letter ‘O’, I’ve got to press it really hard for like 2 seconds before it appears.
Luckily after calling DELL, they have agreed to fix it for me since the machine is still under warranty. The technician will drop by tomorrow.
I’m now thinking, if this happened to my notebook, it could happen to yours too. For now I could still type in the letter ‘O’ (Ouch my fingers hurt right now). But what if there’s really no way to get the letter to appear no matter how hard you hit on to the keypad? Continue Reading »
How to type effectively on a faulty keyboard
Most of you have had to do some PowerPoint presentation to an audience. For many this is a frightening event, associated with sweat, anxiety and even a sleepless night or two. Photo by tobiastoft.
Few of us are born public speakers. With some basic techniques and some experience usually it becomes less intimidating.
Although there are plenty of techniques one can learn to appear more confident and hold the attention of listeners, such as speaking louder, optimal body language, standing up when you speak, wearing clothes that does not distract the hearer and not speaking on one tone all the time, this document will focus more on the preparation of the content that will be presented.
Being well prepared and having content memorized in a way it will easily flow will also help boost confidence.
A well recommended technique for this is using a mind map. Wikipedia defines a mind map as a diagram that is used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key or idea.
Mind mapping software is available on the internet for download. A few examples are:
How does it work? Continue Reading »
Use mind map to help prepare your IT presentation
To all Microsoft Office users out there, guess what? The all new Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta is now available for all to download and try out. To download this Beta version simply head to this URL
The download file is about 684MB in size and after installation should take up about 3.5 GB of your hard disk space.
As I’m writing this post, I’m currently installing the Office 2010 Beta in a Virtual PC environment. The OS in the VPC is Windows 2008, so yea, I’m going to be testing the new Office Beta in a Windows 2008 environment. Hopefully it’s going to install well and run as smoothly as possible. Continue Reading »
Microsoft Office Professional 2010 Beta Download is OUT
|
||
|
|
||
