5 Chapter 5: Intro to IT Consulting

What does Consulting look like? Flying on a plane, sitting in boardroom, dropping a bunch of fancy terms, handing out expensive advice? There’s a great deal more to it than that! It’s all about giving professional guidance as the expert. Clients hire you as an IT consultant because they’re looking for a level of expertise on improving processes, introducing new systems, solving business problems, etc. that they can’t find from within their own company.

To equip you to be your best consulting self, we take some time in Part 2 to give you a run through of the 6 phases that are essential to IT consulting using a spin on the W5H method by exploring for each phase:

• What it means
• When it happens
• Who it involves
• Why it’s important
• How to navigate it

You can consider this like ‘Consulting 101’, what you need to know about all things consulting to set you up for success.

These are the general phases that you will go through as part of the Capstone project, be it in a more staggered waterfall approach or using an agile method. You might spend more time on one phase or another, but each one contains crucial steps to gather the information you need to produce successful and effective deliverables for the course and the company you’ll be working with.

You might be surprised to hear that the IT consulting process is very similar to engineering design. While you aren’t creating a tangible product, you are in a way, acting like an engineer who will be using skills, knowledge, and creative problem solving prowess to come up with ideas that’ll fix something. The following fun videos on engineering design will give you a preview of what you can expect to delve into in the remainder of this section.