Consultants are a truly mobile workforce. Give us a chair, a table, and a power plug, and we can get going. (I have worked without a chair, without a table, and without power in some cases, but not with all three missing so far…)

In a post about buying travel gear I promised to give you all an inside scoop to my portable office – today is the day!

What does a consultant have in his briefcase?

The laptop plus charger is a given, I didn’t take a photo of it. Then there is always some amount of paper you carry around – though I have been able to minimize this since I use the iPad at work. I exclusively take notes during meetings with the iPad now, and most documents for review are handled there as well. Works great!

But what about the details? Let’s start with the cables department.

The tech bag

All cables (except for the laptop charger) are in the one bag shown below – so there is no clutter, nothing tangling up in the bag. As you can see, one of the main things is to keep my phone charged up – but one after the other:

• Wireless presenter. Great for presenting in front of larger groups. I wrote about it here in more detail. Also has a laser pointer that makes our cat at home go bonkers. There is a new one on the market now that looks better but basically does the same. Get it at amazon
• Charging cables for iPhone and iPad, plus the charger for the iPhone. I charge my iPad off the computer, so I don’t carry the small 10w brick that came with it.
• iPhone/iPad car charger. This small gem is powerful enough to power the iPad 3. I love it. Works great on boats as well. Get it at amazon
• USB drive. 16 gigs, use it for everything really. You can never have enough storage.
• Bluetooth mouse: I’d prefer a cable mouse, but with only two USB ports on my laptop, wireless is the way to go. Plus: Less clutter. Works great, only sometimes it doesn’t, and then it costs me an hour of agony to reconnect. Thus no amazon link here…
• Mophie battery case for the iPhone. Saved the bacon more than a few times already, with lots of calls and no power plug anywhere near, this is a life saver. Get it at amazon
• Spare headset: I got a set of Sony in-ears as primary, but in case I forget it or it breaks, I take the original iPhone headset.
• 3,5 mm audio cable: In case a rental car has no bluetooth, no USB, but at least an old fashioned AUX in – I can still get the music going.
• Not shown: There should be a set of spare batteries for the bluetooth mouse and the presenter here, as well – have to restock!

The “small stuff I don’t need often” bag:

• Hand lotion. Great for winter time, but if I unpack it in summer, I don’t have it when I need it.
• Compeed anti blister plasters. The best, especially when wearing in new dress shoes.
• Small former gum pack with useful medication – against pain, hay fever, colds…
• Pocker-sized stapler. Great to keep papers together. Since I switched over to the iPad, I might get rid of it soon.
• Post-Its: Always good to have some of those, but I wouldn’t call them essential. I used to carry a pack of really big ones (like A5 sized – half a legal page) – they are great for some use cases, everybody loves them, but I didn’t have enough application to carry them all the time.

Other stuff that goes into the organizer pockets of my bag:

• Business cards – always carry some.
• Keyfob is for paypal – seldom used, but good security measure.
• Markers: Random selection.
• iPad stylus: Very important – enables me to take written notes, annotate documents, etc. Get it at amazon
• Fountain pen: I got myself a nice Pelikan pen and matching pencil and ballpoint pen as well. Carrying a classy pen actually makes an impression in meetings.
• Sun glasses: Gotta carry that Oakley in style!
• Umbrella: Never a good idea to arrive somewhere soaked.
• Passport: yeah. I ended up abroad once without one (luckily in Europe). Thank god they didn’t check on the flight back home… since then I always have my passport in my briefcase.
• Calculator: This comes in useful more often than you think. It is ten times faster to use than the one on the laptop or the iPhone – and especially when you are sitting over printouts, it is much faster than using Excel.
• Bag for receipts: Whatever I want refunded goes in here. Saves my wallet from exploding from all the cab receipts.
• Change: I don’t have place for small change in my wallet, so it ends up in the trouser pockets. Before I enter the airport, I empty those out into my bag. Affords me a nice meal once I clean that out once in a while.
• Not shown: Some mints.

Where does it go? Apart from the receipts bag and the tech bag (who go into one of the two main compartments, along with the laptop charger, iPad, and papers) all this fits into the front pockets of my Tumi Alpha that you see above in the first picture.

It is essential that everything has its place. This enables you to make a very quick check in the morning to see that you got what you need. Also, avoid removing stuff from your briefcase and packing it somewhere else. I make that mistake with iPhone cables sometimes – but as I carry two by default, that never got me

With this setup, I am up for 95% of my daily tasks, regardless of my location. The morning check takes less than a minute, and when I pack up for the day, everything goes into its place almost automatically by now. That’s the portable office – consultant style.

What is your best practice for the portable office? Is something missing here? Go wild in the comments!

I have tried coming up with good examples  that enforce this point, but they all seemed terribly stupid. I mean – how hard can it be? Bring something to take notes whenever you sit down with a client, full stop. I recently switched to using an iPad with a stylus and the NotesPlus app, but it is the same thing really.

You’ll be amazed at the results: No more “I forgot we agreed on that”, and your clients will have the good feeling that your conversation matters to them. Even if you don’t note much more down that the date and time, the name of your counterpart and the general topic of what you talked about, they’ll feel good about it.

Got it? Wonderful. Now back to that “end of the weekend” glass of red wine!

I’ve been going through the subscription list of my feed reader today.  There are many blogs by consultants that I once subscribed to, but they all seam to be dead by now:

Consultingreality.com seems to have moved on to a land without blogging:

ConsultingQuest seems to have gone undercover:

Consultize.com has become a dead landing page with ads on it…

corporatewhore.blog.com is dead,

the ship of the Covert Consultant on blogspot has sunk long ago:

Getting Drunk in First Class resorted to short stories full of swearing and profanity, but nothing new there since 2010 either…

Consultingpulse.com has no pulse left, either:

Depressing, isn’t it? A lot of blog wasteland.

I am glad to be shaking the dust off the KillerConsultant these days -  so lets end on a more cheerful note! Something for all you Strategic Consultants out there, from OneFTE, one of the funniest business comics out there:

Cheers everybody!

This piece of advice is simple, but it can save you a lot of trouble.

Oftentimes, when you are assigned new work, you do not necessarily have to start working on it immediately – maybe the deadline is still far away, or you know it won’t take a lot of time, or some other topic needs to be finished first.

When you get a new piece of work – do a report, prepare a market analysis, crunch some numbers in Excel, etc. – whatever it is, try to get the first draft done as quickly as possible. Even if it is a shitty first draft (either because you don’t have time to do a better one, or because you don’t have all the necessary information yet, still waiting for parts from a colleague, etc. etc.).

Do that shitty draft. Quickly.

The concept of the “shitty first draft” is not mine – it is from the book Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It is a simple argument: acknowledge that the first draft will be rubbish. This actually makes it easier to get started. Better to do something that needs a lot of rework than not doing anything at all.

In a way, this principle works in consulting as well. Seeing how something comes to be – your calculations, your report structure, your storyline – will help you to…

• make necessary adjustments – While it is still easy to do
• quickly see what questions you still need to ask – before it is awkward to do so, because you reveal how long you waited to tackle the problem
• identify what additional research needs to be done – while there is still time for it

So: get going on the first draft of any deliverable as soon as you can. It can save you a lot of trouble.

Vente Privee, the online privat sales giant, has a sales event for TUMI bags and briefcases starting tomorrow, Friday 15th 2012, 7am CEST (UTC+2). It will run for approximately three days, but the best deals go very fast, so you gotta be quick!

I scored my beloved TUMI briefcase last year the same way, and I paid less than 50% of the regular price. I have been very impressed by the sturdiness, the quality and the little details of the bag – it really is the road warriors’ choice. Plus, many of my former and current colleagues swear on TUMI luggage… so many consultants can’t be wrong

I checked Vente Privee US, but they don’t have the same offer on schedule. TUMI was only on sale one time last year – so my best guess is that you’ll have to wait twelve months before it comes around again. I have not seen TUMI discounted so much anywhere else in Europe – so if you always wanted to replace your laptop bag or suitcase with “the real deal”, tomorrow is the time!

If you are not a member of Vente Privee yet, you can use my invite code:

http://de.vente-privee.com/ExternalLinks/PSL.ashx?cypher=pHfE9z6LtpEHgTxcjacTCA%3D%3D

(Disclosure: I get a 8 EUR voucher from Vente Privee if you sign up through this link, but no further commission or anything else)

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the KillerConsultant

This has kept me quite busy for sure – but I still got a big heart for the KillerConsultant, and it is far from done. Oh no – as I see it, we are just getting started!

The first new thing is the (Killer) Consultants’ Manifesto. It is a draft, a first outline. It is not MECE. It is exaggerating. It is not politically correct. That is why it has been so much fun to write!

Have a look at version 0.1. Comment. Tell me what parts you agree with. Call me out on utter BS (it is in there, for sure!). I’m looking forward to refine this. Because really – apart from some bad jokes, prejudices and anecdotes – has the spirit of what we do really ever been covered on one page? See – we need a manifesto!

I came across this book at the airport last week, and at the end of the day, I had finished it. The book is called
Folienkrieg und Bullshitbingo: Handbuch für Unternehmensberater, Opfer und Angehörige by Ewald F. Walden (Amazon.de link). It is the truth, and nothing but the truth, about working for a big consulting firm. There were tons of  “YES! THIS IS EXACTLY HOW IT IS!”  moments in there, and despite being quite factual and informative, the book is a good laugh (a deeply ironic laugh sometimes, but nonetheless).

If you are considering a job in consulting in Germany – buy the book. You’ll get a very realistic idea of what might be ahead of you, and it gives you the whole picture, with all pro’s and con’s.

If you are a consultant at a big firm – buy the book. See, you are not alone. They all are as crazy as you are. There’s even a list of books to read and movies to watch during the occasional lonesome evening at the hotel.

If your significant other, child, sibling, good friend, etc.  is a consultant at a big firm – buy the book. It will explain a lot, and you will be able to understand some of the strange behaviours that he/she has.

Bottom line: Just buy it. Here.

Disclaimer: I signed up for the Amazon Affiliate Program, so in theory, I’ll get a few cents when you buy the book through the links posted here. I mostly did it to see if my recommendation has any effect whatsoever.

Folder structure – keep it simple and consistent
One folder per project, and within it, a general outline that I keep more or less the same for every project and adapt it to the specific needs / complexities that come up:

In this folder I capture everything that relates to the project, the only other place where files will be stored is the Outlook Inbox (I keep separate .PST files for every major project, so I can clean my Outlook afterwards and archive both .PST and project folder together).

There will be cases where a file that was sent to me via email will be saved in the folder structure as well, which is in effect an unnecessary redundancy, but… a) it is often important to log who sent what when, thus deleting the mail does not do you any good, and b) it is always good to keep a second, clean copy of a file someone sent you, in case you tinker with it and forget to make a duplicate copy.

Don’t create too many sub-folders – just enough so that you can oversee the contents of a folder easily. When too many old versions of the same document pile up (I sometimes have over 50 versions of a file), they go into the “old versions” folder, and get deleted after the end of the project.

The folder “Meetings and Milestones” often helps because in creating documentation for steering committees etc., you normally have to take slides/information from all over the project.

The folder “Single tasks” comes in handy to just file away everything that you did on the fly, mostly quick slides for colleagues, a pivot table that the VP wanted to see, stuff like that.

BTW, the numbers in front of the folder name just keep things in the order I want them to be in, they have no other meaning.

File names – Consistent and self-sorting

I was taught a simple scheme after which to name my files, and it has proven very time saving again and again. It goes like this:

YearMonthDay_ClientName_ProjectName_
DocumentName_Version_Editor.XXX

• YearMonthDay: For example, 20100521 for May 21st 2010. 100521 works fine as well. Chose the date when the document will be presented / is due.
• ClientName: Self explaining. Make it short (“ACME” instead of “ACME Corporation”)
• ProjectName: Self explaining. Take the official one that the client also recognizes
• DocumentName: Must clearly state what is contained (“SalesForecastQ2″ is better than “Forecast”)
• Version: Count up from “_v01″. I do that in regular intervals when saving the document, and at least before sending it to someone else to indicate that there have been changes compared to the version before. When delivering the document to the client, either delete the version numer or replace it with “_final”
• Editor: Put your initials here when you save the document. “_JD” for Jane Doe. That way, everyone in the team knows who made the last edits on the file.
• XXX: The ending of the file type, e.g. “.ppt”

Thus, a file could be named 20100524_ACME_SalesUp_SalesForecastQ2_v04_JD.ppt. If you keep the file structure like that, the files automatically sort themselves if they are sorted by file name, giving you great oversight within the project folder structure.

What are your secrets in dealing with the masses of files that must be handled on a project? Share it in the comments!

I’ve been enjoying this book tremendously over the last days, thought I’d let you know about it.

The book is “Makers” by Cory Doctorow. The story plays in the near future, where some of the emerging trends of today are already steampunk, and the up-and coming gizmos of the science labs are found in the small store next door. The story makes you learn about important innovation trends, like 3D printing, open innovation, crowdsourcing, biotechnology body enhancing, etc. – and have the joy of reading a novel – two in one fun. There’s really a lot covered here, as was to be expected by one of the best novelists of the dotcom era.

If you want to give the KC a little love, use these links for your purchases on
amazon.de or amazon.com. (Disclaimer: Those are affiliate links and I get, like, bootloads of money if you click them, but it doesn’t cost you a dime.) Thanks, and enjoy the book!

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.
(Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken“)