After years in consultation and support, there is a couple of trick I found really useful where it comes to establishing rapidly a good relationship with clients or with development teams. The area it targets is support. While this could be surely be used in consultation in general, support is a little different. Consultation is usually delivering a whole milestone to a customer, while support is helping customer delivering with a higher quality and more rapidly.

Here is a way I found useful to address the delivery of support services to a customer. Those "rules" are not universal, and can be far from some circumstances. I hope that at least it will give some ideas on how it can be achieved.

Understand

Have a clear understanding of the vision, the mission, the current strategies and objectives on both technical and business side. Ask questions, guessing is your enemy. Before going to the next step, you should have enough information to give good advise.

Impress

Impress by comprehension, impress by solutions, impress by vision. Everybody wants to be understand, let them know that you understand their point of view in the current context. The clients also want solutions to their problems, let them know that there is one, and let them know that the solution can be the base of a solution for future problems too.

Realize

Think small and achieve it fast with innovative and tangible solutions. Talking is good, but having a result is better. A small project realized in a real context is the seed of an healthy relationship.

Coach

Get teams work together, in a direction that is benefic for the client, the project and the ultimate client, that is the users who will be using the software.

Over Deliver

Deliver a little over expectation, so that everybody want to follow an already-given direction. Selling the the next steps is easier when the seed are already in the soil.

Finally, there are a lot of ways to delivery top-quality service in both consultation or support services. This is one of the way I found to be successful while being quite simple.

-f.