IT consultants can get worn out or burned out in their profession for a number of reasons.  Most of these reasons help identify a next potential step that should likely be taken in order to keep the consulting career going for these technical gurus.  Let’s first look at the reasons for potential consultant burn out and then we can examine possible ways to combat that burn out and keep the consulting career alive.


Technology


IT consultants have a reputation for living on the leading – or even ‘bleeding’ – edge of technology and they often see that as one of the reasons they’re called in to save the day.  It’s difficult to wake up and realize that the technology you’ve been working with is no longer cutting edge and it may not produce a strong enough client base to keep your consulting practice going.  Many consultants have reported that the specialties that used to earn them a solid six figures for many years started to evaporate when the marketplace made a radical shift in direction.


For the IT consultant who is starting to burn out because marketing their skills is now taking up more time than the work itself, the answer may not be to keep spending your time and energy on that frustrating task.  It may be to address the skill set issue and acquire new marketable skills.  It can take time and money, but may pay back huge dividends.


Monotony


Another potential burn out cause is monotony.  Many consultants report that they’ve become stuck in a niche that just isn’t offering enough challenge to them.  Their clients are impressed and excited about their skills in, say, data recovery.  But to the consultant stuck in that single niche, the job has gotten monotonous.


What this may be telling the consultant is that they should be acquiring new skills now to keep themselves motivated and interested, and to also make them marketable down the road when the tasks that are boring them now are no longer in high demand.


Isolation


Social isolation may be the most commonly reported problem for the IT consultant.  This type of potential burnout comes from getting tired, over time, of working for themselves.  The IT consultant always has that outsider status that comes in and saves the day.  Rarely viewed as really part of the team, but more as a savior or subject matter expert, they are often revered, but not often ‘included.’  This can get isolating over time and is the basis of frustration and burnout for some long-term consultants.


Burn out of this nature may be a signal to the consultant that their peer network should be stronger.  A remedy may be to become more active in organizations featuring consultants in their niche or area of expertise.  For example, a project management consultant may want to join the Project Management Institute (PMI) and start taking part in their monthly local charter meetings and other networking events.


Combative measures


For consultants who are starting to see the signs of burnout, there are a few actions that can be taken to potentially lessen or eliminate those burned out feelings and help rejuvenate their consulting career.  Let’s look at these options further.


Reduce commitments


If you find that you are working eighty-hour weeks, never take a vacation or spend time with your family – or both – then it may be a good time to reduce the number of commitments you have.  Remind yourself that one of the reasons you started consulting was so that you could have more control over your life – not less.


Look at your client list carefully.  Are there clients on there who are taking advantage of your working relationship with them?  Are they asking too much and possibly taking advantage of a lax billing arrangement you’ve made with them?  It may be time to cut that chord or change the billing arrangement.


Be selective


Being selective in new work you take on can serve two purposes.  It can keep you from getting too overloaded and it can also help you to select those new assignments that will offer you the chance to acquire new skills.  This will both energize you in the present, and make you more marketable in the very near future.  A win-win for your consulting practice and earning potential.


Increase your rate


All IT consultants struggle with this and it may cause you to lose clients, but if you need to cut back on your commitments raising your hourly rate may be a good way to do that.  You will likely find yourself working fewer hours, but it may also result in more challenging and career-growing assignments that will help you to gain new areas of specialization.


Get out of the house


Some consultants who work from home end up feeling like they are always at work.  It’s too easy to sit down with your laptop in the evening just to check on a client and find yourself working till 2:00am.  Renting an office space may be one remedy.  Another may be to find a locale – a local coffee shop or similar venue – to work from, say, every afternoon from 1-5pm after working from home in the morning.  That can also give you a clean stopping point for the day.


Summary


IT consulting can be very rewarding and often presents unique challenges that carry the consultant’s enthusiasm from one project to the next.  But there is also the potential for burn out and the only way around that is to actively combat it as we’ve discussed in this article.  It’s not always easy to keep it fresh, but seeking out new challenges and allowing your skills to grow can go a long way in keeping you happy and on top of your game for your clients.

Don’t you wish there was formula for the perfect project meeting? A set of steps or processes or actions to follow to pull off the meeting to end all meetings? Well, there isn’t. Sorry. Meetings, in general, aren’t fun and most attendees would rather be doing almost anything else than sitting in your project meeting. But, there is hope. Meetings are necessary. Your attendees even need the info that you pass along to them in these meetings that they would probably rather not be attending. So, with that somewhat necessary attendance in mind, let’s discuss what I consider to be my personal 5 steps to great – if not perfect – project meetings.


#1 - Plan for it. Never go into a meeting planning to just “wing it.” Your attendees will sense your lack of preparation and take that to mean that your meetings aren’t very important to you. And if they aren’t important to you, then why should they be important to them? So plan well for them, create an agenda, and share that agenda with all planned attendees a day in advance, if possible. That gives everyone enough time to prepare their contributions, if necessary.


#2 - Expect contribution. Next, expect contribution. Construct your meeting and agenda so that you seek input from others in the room and they will know it and expect it. That expected participation will keep attendance high, participation high, and accountability high. All key ingredients for good meetings.


#3 - Don’t bring food. Don’t supply food, don’t bring food and don’t give any indication that food is ok at your meetings. It is disruptive, it makes people sleepy, and it is just plain unprofessional. And for those hungry participants who didn’t bring food, it can be extremely distracting. No food. Period. Unless you are planning an all day session…then yes…you better feed your participants or you will be dispised.


#4 - End on time. Always adhere to the specified timeframe for your meetings. People have other things to do on their jobs – even other meetings to attend even if they aren’t nearly as productive as your meetings. So start on time, end on time, and cover the planned materials.


#5 - Never cancel. One final note – never cancel your meetings. Never doesn’t really mean “never”. But don’t make a habit of canceling a regular weekly project meeting just because there is very little to cover. Even if your weekly project status call or meeting may only last 5 minutes, don’t cancel it. Consistency breeds participation and attendance. As soon as you start to cancel meetings on a regular basis, your attendance levels will dip dramatically. You’ll be the project manager with the unimportant meetings. Don’t be that person.


Summary


Again, there is no perfect formula. But by adhering to these five practices, your meetings should be productive, meaningful, effective, and efficient on an ongoing basis. And the project manager who consistently holds those types of meetings will have the highest regular attendance, the great participation levels, and the best meeting outcomes over the course of their project engagements.


Thoughts from our readers? Would you like to share your own stories and tips on running great project meetings? Please share your thoughts by commenting on this article. Thanks!

Your organization has a project management office or is planning to create one. But is it truly viable? Will it be able to make it through the growing pains to become a functional piece of the company infrastructure or will it fail like so many project management offices have in organizations both small and large?


Here I've outlined what I believe to be the four key elements of project management office (PMO) success. I've seen many built, fail, and be built again only to fail again because the same mistakes are made over and over again. Follow these four key elements and the likelihood that your PMO will be viable will increase drastically...


Strong, experienced leadership. There may be lots project managers and organization executives who feel differently about this than I do or want to cut budget to cover all bases, but I feel strongly that a PMO director should only direct project managers and the PM infrastructure and project manager should manage projects. I’ve seen too many PMOs led by directors who were also leading projects. Every single one I witnessed that in has failed. I realize that smaller organizations may not be able to financial support a full-fledged PMO that has a dedicated director. That’s understandable and their model will likely need to be different. But when possible, the director needs to be a dedicated leader of the PMO who focuses on the career development of project managers, hires good PM's for the PMO, paves the way to success for projects by aiding project managers in need, and acts as the liaison to senior management for the project managers and PMO.


Executive buy-in. Nothing says you’re in it for the long haul like being the baby of someone high up. Of course you need to perform as well. But if your PMO has the buy-in from the leaders at the top of your organization, then the likelihood that it will be well funded and well stocked with competent, seasoned project managers is much higher. You need for important projects to be thrown to the PMO right from inception and that will only happen if you have buy-in for the PMO infrastructure from the leaders of the company.


Availability of the right tools. The most successful project offices have solid policies and project templates in place that have been successful in the past and that will help guide the project managers successfully as the PMO is gaining footing in the organization. And they have the right project management software tools in the hands of the project managers who need to effectively and efficiently manage projects and lead teams and customers. These policies, templates and tools will be re-hashed and refined by the PMO director and the individual project managers – together – as the PMO grows and matures.


Staffed by experienced project managers. The PMO must focus on hiring good, experienced project managers. Too many times they phone it in and ask HR to find some PMs with 3-5 years experience and PMP certification. That’s the lazy route and there is no way that organization will find long-term success. Find experienced PMs with good successes and a few failures under their belt and the rest will take care of itself.


Summary / call for input


Your organization can keep creating project management offices over and over again till they get it right. Or they can do their best to start with a good foundation and get it right the first time. These four key elements are essential for creating a viable, long lasting, successful and productive project management office. Do you have suggestions for other areas that should be consider when creating a project management office? What pain points have you experienced that we haven't covered here? Please share and discuss.

Oh the project client who always wants the latest and greatest status. Asking for more info like you're holding something back. The same is true for your senior leadership. Either they just don't believe your reporting or they are too lazy to read anything and want to hear it from you...which may be the case - especially if they have an agenda and some questions in their head that they must get answered.


In the long run, of course, it's best to always have almost up to the minute accuracy in the project status report. I realize that's nearly impossible - and completely impractical. But what we can do is make sure that the status report - and project schedule - is updated every week and that both contain as much accurate and up to date detail as possible when we walk into that weekly project status meeting with those two things in hand ready to drive the meeting forward.


How do we do that? Well, it's simple, but not always easy. And there are a couple of ways to do it depending on how well your project team members communicate and how much you can trust their accuracy without asking some detailed questions to drill down to a more specific or accurate status update from them.


Option 1 - the revised status report and schedule


This is likely your easiest option - if you can trust your team to actually make status updates or revise their own tasks in a commonly accessed collaborative project scheduling tool. I did this once on a very large government project that contained nearly 8,000 tasks. And to get to the point of that fully detailed, 8,000 task project schedule it took some serious work on the part of me and my staff and the use of mind mapping software with several peer managers on the program to get us there. It was really more like a large program – ongoing for three years – and I required updates by peer managers (who could delegate to their team if they wanted, but they were still responsible for their updates). It worked pretty well – they couldn’t all be trusted all the time, but I knew who to regularly follow-up on and who’s input my team had to closely check up on and verify.


If this approach works, great. Just send out an editable copy of last week's status report and have them send back their revisions one day before the weekly status call with the project customer. And do the same with the project schedule - have them make their own task progress updates and get them to you a day before the customer meeting so that you can finalize everything, ask any follow up questions you might have, and then send the revised status report and schedule off to all stakeholders for the weekly status call.


Option 2 - the internal weekly meeting


This is the option that I almost always resort to. I call the other one easier because in a perfect world, if your team does a great job of putting in their updates, you should just have to do a quick check and send it. Sure. Just like my kids don’t take care of the house quite as well as I do because they don’t own it – I do. Yes, the PM owns the schedule, the status report and everything about the project. So, if you want to make sure that you’re sending out the latest and greatest status information right before the weekly status call with that very demanding project customer, then this is the way you’ll likely want to go.


Every week I conduct an internals status meeting/call with my team. Usually it’s the day before the customer call. I use this opportunity to verify where I think everything stands and to go around the table and get updates, issues and concerns from everyone. Then, that evening I make sure that the project status report, the project schedule, the resource forecast, the issues and risks lists, and the budget forecast shows everything as up to date through that day. That’s the best I can do and all anyone can really ask for. And, when speaking in reality, this is the easiest option – at least for me. Again, because no one truly owns it like the project manager and no one cares about it nearly as much.


Summary


Our project clients deserve up to date project information. Some are demanding and some are pretty disengaged. But at least when we sit down with them on a weekly basis we should be able to guarantee that the information we are reviewing is 99% accurate to that moment in time. It makes for more productive meetings, increased customer confidence and participation, and far fewer ‘takeaway tasks’ from the project status call than if you walk in with many outdated piece to the project status puzzle.

What if you never dropped the ball as a team or project leader?

What if you could have every base covered? Wouldn't that be amazing? You have all the information you need to make great decisions. All information and status updates you need to have the best and most accurate status reports and the most interesting and productive meetings possible?

Even though this seems to sound like it is focused on project managers, it is not. I am going to direct this at business analysts. One - because it's my article and I often handle both roles and can do what I want AND Two - because business analysts in certain projects actually perform the more communicative and facilitator role than the more figurehead project manager. It depends on the project. But there are always those pitfalls. Those behaviors that can be detrimental to the project and we may not even know we are doing things wrong. Consider these five and then let me know what you think...

Micro Managing Resources

Micromanaging is a huge mistake! You probably know that already and may just not realize you're doing it. It serves no good purpose. Stop the oppressive behavior in your leadership style. You won't be a respected and followed leader of projects and teams if the behavior continues. Your team members are in place because they are experts at what they do. Trust them until they have done something to break that trust. Expect the best and you'll probably get the best. Help - don't hinder - team progress, forward thinking, and innovation...

​Keep reading!!

Project management doesn't really change that much.
​
New project management software comes out from new or existing providers and the Project Management Institute (PMI) revises the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) every so often.

And new PM consulting services and resources and training organizations are formed. But for the most part, project management as a profession stays rather static. PM best practices are logical best steps to reporting on, effectively and successfully leading and efficiently deploying projects and end solutions. They may differ a bit from project manager to project manager and from organization to organization, but they are what they are...logical best steps to PM success.

However, there are some new developments in IT of course and in project management related to project security and we need to be paying attention. Hacking and cyber crime is on the rise. It's changing technology, it's changing the landscape of the data and sensitive information on the projects we are leading and it should definitely be changing the way we plan for and approach these projects we are managing. Getting hacked isn't just something that happens to someone else anymore. It's happened to more than 40% of my project and consulting clients to some degree over the past 2-3 years and that number will only go up.

Here are four areas where I see cyber risks affecting our organizations, project management infrastructures and the actual projects we are managing starting right now.

Fingerprint Security And Hacking.
Not a lot has been said about what happens if a large or national or critical database full of fingerprints gets hacked. Our identity being in danger as customers of a big retail store that gets hacked is one thing. It's inconvenient, we get a new credit card, maybe wait for FDIC insured dollars to be restored to us or our credit reports to get fixed. But our fingerprints? We can't get new ones of those. I predict a huge fingerprint database hack in the next 12-24 months. It could affect office places and computer equipment that use fingerprints as security access, and it could also affect court cases and forensic evidence. Next those hacked fingerprints will be used on special gloves by the bad guys to frame innocent people when they break into stores, homes and workplaces or even commit murders. Scary stuff...

My background is primarily information technology and project management. What I've learned from my experiences in those areas and from attendance at the last five Black Hat digital security conferences and from everything I've read and studied everywhere is this...everything can be hacked. Everything. Does that have to be me and my projects? Maybe. Does that have to be you and your organization and your projects? Maybe. I've done a personal assessment of my clients over the past year and found that about 1 in 4 had experienced some sort of data breech. That matched up pretty well with other predictions and surveys I have read recently.

What can we do about it? We can't fully eliminate the possibility of a hack or identity theft or major data breech. Hackers are always a step ahead of all of us. If full prevention and avoidance is basically out of the question, then we need to focus on risk identification, mitigation and response. There are many amazing organizations coming up with software tools and services to help organizations realize safer environments today and tomorrow.

This is not an endorsement of any one service or solution or a ranking by any means. Rather it is a beginning presentation of a few of the enormous amounts of really good solutions and services that are waiting out there to help us prepare for this potential onslaught of hacking, data breeches, and targeted cyberattacks. What I'd like to do today is present a few of those we should all possibly start to consider...

Securonix

SNYPRwww.securonix.com/ is a security analytics platform that transforms big data into actionable security intelligence. Developed by Securonix, the market leader in user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) for cyber security, SNYPR delivers the proven power of Securonix analytics with the speed, scale, and affordable, long-term storage of Hadoop in a single, out-of-the box solution. Put simply, SNYPR is the most sophisticated big data security analytics platform ever built.

What does SNYPR mean for enterprise security?

• A holistic enterprise security analytics platform that marries best-of-breed big data and analytics technologies
• Real-time detection the most sophisticated ad#advanced persistent threats, insider threats, hard-to see and “low and slow” attacks over extended periods of time
• All historical, security-relevant data is available for investigation

With SNYPR, organizations become more effective by infusing actionable security intelligence into their existing security management practices, allowing them to see more and do more with fewer resources, lower costs, and to gain a completely new perspective on information security threats and risks in their business.

Varonis

Varonis provides software solutions that protect company data from insider threats and cyberattacks. Varonis specializes in unstructured data -- file and email systems that store valuable spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, audio and video files, emails, and text. This rapidly growing data often contains an enterprise's financial information, product plans, strategic initiatives, intellectual property, and confidential employee, customer or patient records. It is the data that companies tend to have the most of and know the least about in terms of insight into who has access, who does access and when they access those files.

IT and business personnel deploy Varonis software for a variety of use cases, including data security, governance and compliance, user behavior analytics, alerting, archiving, search, and file synchronization and sharing. With the rise in ransomware and other malware threats, Varonis solutions protect organizations by ensuring only the right people have access to the right files, monitoring access and flagging potential abuses. So if a user’s files begin encrypting from a ransomware breach, Varonis is able to alert and notify IT in time to prevent or limit the damage.

Mimecast

Mimecast's targeted threat protection with impersonation protection can protect employees from the new breed of email cyberattack. According to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whaling email scams alone were up 270 percent from January to August 2015. The FBI also reported business losses due to whaling of more than $1.2 billion in little over two years, and an additional $800 million in the six months since August 2015.

Whaling attacks are real. And, cybercriminals are becoming more inventive and creative when it comes to compromising organizations. Whaling attacks seek to fraudulently trick employees into making wire or data transfers to the cybercriminal as a way of generating income for organized crime. With Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection with Impersonation Protect, organizations can protect their employees and financial assets from this type of fraud. Impersonation Protect provides instant and complete protection against this new breed of cyberattack by email, which is often malware-less and based entirely on social engineering, thereby able to pass through traditional gateway checks.

Thycotic

Thycotic Secret Server delivers a comprehensive Privileged Account Management solution set to protect your most valuable information assets from cyberattacks and insider threats. Thycotic Secret Server, Application Control, Local Security and Security Analytics solutions protect privileged accounts and enables organizations to enforce least privilege policies for business and administrative users, as well as control applications to reduce the attack surface without halting productivity.

The solution helps organizations revoke everyday local administrator privileges from business users while seamlessly elevating privileges when required by trusted applications. Complementing these privilege controls, the solution also delivers application controls, which are designed to manage and control which applications are permitted to run on endpoints and servers and prevent malicious applications from penetrating the environment.

Trustlook

Trustlook is a global leader in next-generation mobile device security with solutions that find more vulnerabilities sooner than any other to provide the industry's smallest vulnerability window. Trustlook's solutions protect users from both known and zero-day threats by examining over 20,000 new and updated applications every day for malware and malicious behavior.

The innovative Trustlook Antivirus & Mobile Security app available on Google Play protects your Android phone or tablet against malware, harmful viruses, spyware, trojans, phishing attempts and unsafe web browsing. In also includes additional features such as data backup and restore, speed boost, find my device and Identity Check, bringing you a fully featured security solution for Android mobile devices and platforms.

Summary / call for input

Cybersecurity concerns are big and real and are here today and everyday going forward. If you you're a CTO, CIO, CEO, project manager or other and your organization is involved in the tech industry anywhere or in any space or if you are taking on data sensitive projects or initiatives, you need to be aware. Anything and everything can be hacked...it only takes one visit to the Black Hat conference to realize that. I'm not saying that these organizations presented here can solve your problems. Hackers are already working on their next data breech...you can't stop that. But you can take steps – and it starts with organizations, software and services like these presented here. Look to this space for more cyber security options and more cyber crime prevention services to come.

"I Want Be Man" is a 1982 song by Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Cheap Trick about a robot being sick of his robot body and his yearning to be in a human body...

"I'd rather be a man
Instead of a machine
Flesh and blood life and death
It's a mystery
Nothing to be programmed
Nothing is for sure
And least there's a reason
A reason for my life
I want be man
You want be me
I want to live in your body"

and so now we have this...​

When China's Top Artificial Intelligence Guru Lee Kai-Fu has discussed how AI is changing the shape of the world, people listen. And he assumes big changes in a short time.

People pay attention to what Dr. Lee Kai-Fu says. In China, fifty million people follow him on social media, which means that he has more fans than the Revolutionary guy and Mars Visionary Elon Musk.

Dr. Kai-Fu believes that "AI is giving new look to the world as we know". But beyond the flickering turn of the phrase, the 57-year-old has heavyweight credentials.

He was the founding president of Google China from 2005 to 2009. And in his early times, he had worked at Microsoft and Apple as a Vice President.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls Dr. Lee’s book on the New York Times bestseller list- AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and New World.

I think we are diverted from the Question. Let's back to our main topic

The point of concern is that Dr. Lee is not involved in human-robot marriages because when small people can consider robots as human beings, most of us - even children - know the difference between a toy or a pet and a human relationship.

Giving them (the elderly) primitive, fake and inanimate non-emotional robots to connect is a cruel thing that we should not do in the form of human beings.

He acknowledged that AI can be used for worldly activities, such as reminding us to take our medicine or to monitor safety. But for this AI specialist, the human warmth part is paramount.

Dr. Lee Says "My mother was in dementia, and when she had lived for the past 15 years, it was her child who probably had spent 5 to 10 hours a day with her, which kept her dementia from worsening." From this, you can say that a robot can never do this.

Dr. Lee predicts that AI will make countless jobs in a short time. He sees 40 percent - which is thousands of millions of jobs - disappearing in only 15 years. Ya, there are disadvantages of AI but there are more advantages that will help the world towards the next step of the future revolution...

​Risk management is one of those tasks that we all say we need to dedicate a significant amount of time to up front in the project – and throughout – when, in reality, we often don’t. Like conducting lessons learned sessions at the end of the project, few ever really take the necessary time and resources to properly identify risks and lay out plans with their project teams and the customer on how best to either mitigate or avoid those risks.


Risk management is not just a beginning-of-the-project activity. To truly do it right it needs to be a living, breathing thing. It needs to be something you review and revisit regularly throughout the project. In fact, I’m a big proponent of creating a combined Issues/Risks list that gets reviewed every week with the customer as part of the project schedule and project status review. That way, you have your issues and risks in front of every key member of the project every week and nothing can ever get too far out of hand.


That said, I’m making it sound like I do a great job of always managing risks on my projects. I don’t. I try…but I don’t. Sure, the very highly visible projects get significant risk attention. So do the ones where the customers are concerned about risks and want the time spent on the activities surrounding risk management. But often customers are hesitant to spend a lot of money on project management and related activities – and risk management is one of those ‘related’ activities.


So, when you’re working on one of those less visible projects and you feel like you don’t have the time, dollars, or customer interest to really track risks in detail and the way they should be identified and managed, what do you do? I’ve always felt that – in those types of situations – they key is to focus on those critical threats that have a higher probability to occur and pose a real threat to the engagement.  Spend less time on those issues that are unlikely to occur.


Determining impact thresholds


What that means is that you still have to sit down with your customer and your project team and identify risks up front. But what you’re really going to concern yourselves with are the risks that fall above some pre-determined threshold of likelihood to occur. Say, 50%. You and your team and your customer need to determine, as you go through the risks, what the likelihood that risk is to occur and impact your project. If it’s above 50%, document it. If it’s below 50%, toss it out.


You can even take it several steps further – by looking at it in terms of timeframe and budget impact. Let’s say you don’t care if a risk occurs as long as it won’t set the project back more than two weeks. Granted all of these assignments are arbitrary guesses by your team but the key is that you all agree on them and track them accordingly. So, any risk you identify that is more than 50% likely to occur and will impact your project by more than two weeks in terms of timeframe, track it. Next, consider budget. For example, will the total impact be greater than $10,000 (resources, equipment, etc.)? Now you’re only concerned with risks that are more than 50% likely to occur, will impact the project by more than two weeks, and will impact the project budget by more than $10,000.


Summary


This is one suggestion of a way to avoid tracking every single risk throughout the project if you feel overwhelmed or don’t have the time. The thresholds you set must be ones you set in complete agreement with the customer and your project team. Otherwise, there will still be finger pointing if and when one of the ignored risks jumps up to bite you. But it’s one way to minimize the amount of the budget and planning time spent on risk management if your resources are limited.


I invite our readers to share creative ways they go about managing risks on projects where it’s less than top priority to the paying customer or you simply don’t have the resources and time to spend tracking every single risk.