Advice to a Young ERP Consultant Part 10:

Advisor, Teacher, Therapist:

Three legs of the ERP Consulting Tripod.

Effective ERP consulting is a mix of hard-skills and soft-skills. So far, we've focused on building and demonstrating your ERP knowledge (hard-skills). To tackle soft-skills, let's start by thinking about the roles you play when providing ERP consulting services.

Advisor:

What customers need, and what customers think they need can be very different. And both of these can be completely different from what they were sold.

As an ERP consultant, you are an advisor. Listening to requirements, sifting through the “whys behind the why” to understand the reasons a company does things certain ways, understanding how much automation is useful or standardization possible are essential when making design decisions in a system that will affect an entire company.  As an advisor, you need to guide your customer in framing and making critical decisions throughout the implementation.

Teacher:

Whether training end-users or “training-the-trainers”, a large part of your role is to teach others how to use the ERP. This may involve facilitating hands-on sessions in how to perform business processes, or documenting processes asynchronously.

Beyond knowing how your ERP works, you need to know how to teach it.

Therapist:

Don't laugh. Transitioning to a new business system is full of change and uncertainty.  Change is hard.  Uncertainty is scary.  No matter how automated, business systems are still ultimately operated by humans, not robots.  

People need to be heard.  Their concerns need to be addressed.  It is essential to get everyone in the company working together to make the transition a success.  Good listening and empathy, ERP-Consultant-As-Therapist, can move mountains in business system implementation projects.

What other Roles does an ERP Implementation Consultant Perform?