A Solution Consultant’s Odyssey
In this chit-chat, I want to shed light on what makes a good solution consultant, based on multiple live stories. The original article was published in this address, I humbly edit and translate to English. I owe the debt of gratitude to my fellow colleague Fritz Thomas Schultz for giving me the courage of typing these lines.
What is Solution Consultancy?
To keep it short; constructing a data architecture addressing the business requirements (i.e. HR expenses, profitability scores, effective positioning of the product in the market or monthly marketing burns) and simultaneously holding hands of your client company, for not letting the feeling of a fish out of the water once it is time to say good-bye. I know it sounded bit vague, but not my fault, I have witnessed couple of cases that even reality — itself — was vague. Maybe decomposing a typical process into pieces can help to explain:
Processes in Solution Consultancy Universe
All happening on a hazy morning when you notice a message in your Slack:
Person-X from Sales Department: Morning! <some crap>
Person-Y (Solution Consultant): <counter-crap>
X: I have some good news, we have finally concluded the sales process with <new client’s name>. According to your capacity planning, your current project with <an ongoing client’s name> will be over by <date>. So new project’s kick-off is 2 days after. We are planning to utilize you with <some crew members>, what do you say?
Y: Positive! Can you please fwd me the proposal?
X: <residual crap>
Y: <residual crap>
As the message above exhibits, a solution consultant jumps into the train, somewhere in the middle, subsequent to reach-out and sales phases. Client and your sales team have already signed some sort of legal contracts, kick-off date (and an approximate delivery date also) and overall scope are roughly decided. At this stage, the solution consultant who is coupled with colleagues that are supposed to deliver distinct contributions, starts to put Lego pieces together.
First Stage: Internalizing the Problem and Projecting a Solution
From the very first date I have joined into consultancy, there is an expression resonating in my ears; “managing the expectancies of the client”. Apparently this is one of the most influential things that a solution consultant has to address even before touching his/her computer, and that covers comprehending the clients expectations from the project and feedback to what extend these expectancies can be delivered. The existence of out-of-scope requirements does not necessarily indicate a failure or inadequacy, especially the will/fixation of up-selling is considered. En effet, realization of an up-sell can be regarded a strong indicator of meeting preliminary demands and quality concerns. In respect to this, expectancy management should be executed neither loosely with over-generous estimations nor tightly to lead asphyxiation of implementors. To align on modus operandi and all other relevant matters, client’s office constitutes the first destination of the solution consultant. First task is to meet with stakeholders with high expectations and internalize them. Following the collection, stakeholders are requested to sort these KPIs, for obtaining a list of prioritisation. At this point, I want to highlight a well-known diagram which is used for allocating time and deciding which KPIs to add-to-cart or leave-out.

Reinforced by the solution consultant, stakeholders who harbour the business mindset and affinity with in-place data architecture, are kindly asked to place KPIs into plain effort-impact graph. No need to mention, KPIs which are located in the IV. quadrant present “low hanging fruits” with high business impact, and are the added to the cart first. Rest depends on the distance between the agreed project duration and cumulative time estimations. Based on available time left, KPIs in either III. or II. are added in to the scope of project and so on. The acknowledgement of abandoned KPIs are exchanged with stakeholder(s).
By the end of this process, a document called SDD (System Design Document) becomes apparent in the horizon. Since there is no universally accepted format, all SDDs differ from each other, yet the steps and data points needed to deliver those KPIs and existing structures are sine-qua-non components of this document. Existing structures can be any of the followings:
- DWH structure (Cloud, on-premise, …)
- Data sources (tracking, online marketing, logistic, ordering, CRM, …)
- File storage (S3, SFTP, …)
- PM tools (JIRA, Asana, Trello, …)
but also any artefact that can facilitate the project execution in a healthy and performant manner. As mentioned above, alignment is a key factor of success in consultancy projects, thus the milestones of a robust project are paved at this step.
Second Stage: Tool Stack Selection
Broadly speaking, there are two distinct client types; the ones who are fixated with a solution proposal in mind even at the doorstep of the consultant, and the ones who are ready to hand themselves to the consultant. Regardless of preconception or complete surrender, there are undeniable concerns which any client have to bear in mind during the tool stack selection. Modern-day vendor market is saturated enough to be able to meet and address those concerns with abundance and diversification. Some of the concerns that most of clients share nowadays are:
- Fiscal burden,
- Pre-existence of in house units which can take over the project, once the structure is set up and handed over (know-how),
- Consistency and compliance of the new structure within the overall tech ecosystem, and
- Data volume, variety, velocity and recency (3V of Data).
Once the tool stack is determined, a road-map starts to become more and more tangible in the solution consultant’s mind.

Third Stage: Implementation
Personally, one of the very first reasons why I enjoy working as a solution consultant is, the mentality of “a pinch of/from everything” prevails. In order to survive in this jungle, a solution consultant must have some understanding about many constituents. A pinch of business mindset (to be able to decipher business requirements and translate them into 0’s and 1’s), a pinch of engineering mindset (especially for provisioning and infrastructural setup), a hand-full pinch of SQL (at the level of a ninja for visionary architectures and optimisations), a pinch of Python skills to the degree of communicating with APIs (which grants a flexibility to switch between querying and programming languages), and a little bit of aesthetics (especially in visualization) are among highly requested skills and competencies in solution consultancy. A human-being who accommodates those skills — based on the know-how intensity — can easily be recruited as a data engineer, data scientist, data analyst and/or business analyst. This fact grants a room for freedom of versatility to a solution consultant. On the other hand, this holistic nature of the job brings “solution” prefix to the consultancy and the opportunity to melt all down in the same pot.
Data pipeline illustrated above summarizes the overall data lineage in broad strokes:
- Emerging data structure that facilitates the storage and flow of data from various data sources: Infrastructure, Python knowledge -> Data Engineer role
- Data standardization, preparation for reporting/analysis and translating into KPIs: SQL, Python, Business mindset -> Data Scientist, Data Analyst, Business Analyst roles
- Analysis, reporting and data visualization: Python, Tool Know-How (i.e. Looker ML) -> Data Analyst and Business Analyst roles
Nowadays, 80–85% of clients are relying on Cloud solutions for addressing their data relevant needs. Thus, all of steps mentioned above can be undertaken simply by virtual handshakes without any hustle, like plug-and-play. Actual usage figures reveal the dominance/upward trend of the tools from following vendors:
- Infrastructure solutions: Amazon and Google,
- DWH solutions: Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery and Postgres
- Data Integration solutions: Fivetran, Matillion, Data Virtuality and Stitch
- Visualization solutions: Tableau, Looker, DataStudio, PowerBI and QuickSight
After a long time, I am working in an office environment in which the average age is higher than usual (the office average is 32–33). That fact gives me the satisfaction of sharing my room with fellow colleagues who excel at least one of the solutions listed above. Yet, as we all are aware, IT sector is dreadful and merciless, when you stop running, it heavily punishes you. One big advantage of working as a solution consultant, is the chance of keeping self up-to-date with recent improvements and patch updates and even new approaches to ever-reccuring problems. Moreover as a solution consultant is seasoned with experience, it becomes inevitable to obtain a sense of understanding and accommodate comparative reasoning to many recommendations made.
As a matter of fact, each client or even each project is a brand new puzzle, with ever changing puzzle pieces. If solving puzzle is your thing, then solution consultancy can be a good path to take. Picture entering into a tunnel, being a solution consultant necessitates fixating one eye to the exit door, while the other to what to step on. Data modelling is an agglutinative process, just like Leaning Tower of Pisa, the impeccability of robustness and fulfilment of prerequisites define the wellbeing of the structure’s form to be built upon. That enforces a solution consultant to bear risk assessment mentality in mind. “what might fail”, “what precautions to undertake” or “what consequences can be encountered” are integral questions of conceptualization and implementation, and lead to enhancement of instincts and rational and strategical thinking.
Why don’t we all go to the promised lands, then?
Well, solution consultancy is definitely not a rose garden. Based on my observations, I can — without hesitation — put this forth, likelihood of a solution consultant looking for the same position following his/her resignation is notably low. And “stress” factor is the usual suspect here. Maybe one of the very first question that has to be answered is:
Do I really want to be employed in a job that involves such intense human interaction?
Client handling is prone to be maddening and tedious, moreover extremely troublesome if ethics and moral values are rigid and super omnia. Consultancy, regardless of how sad it is, is a dog-eat-dog world that every participant exposes his/her supremacy and alphaness, by finger pointing the lack or inadequacy of others. Being Switzerland (neutral and stuck) in all power conflicts is not the most ideal place for softhearted people.
Moreover, I have a bad news for those who fancy working in autonomous environments; as in the analogy of rings of the chain, success is a conjoint effort and evaluated collectively. Any factor that can jeopardize the success might have to be addressed proactively, regardless whether it falls in your jurisdiction or interest area.
Last but not least, the requirement of multi-tasking can also constitute a struggle for people who suffer focusing issues. If and when necessary, it is common to be employed in 3–4 different projects simultaneously, thus the expectancy of minimum loss of concentration and maximum diligence across various projects can be tiresome. No need to mention, how most of the clients deem themselves as “the unique company to be served” and you the “fish in a red ocean”.
Anterograde Gains of a Solution Consultant
This section can be perceived as “must haves” and achievements. In reality, what separates a newbie consultant from a senior is the intensity and diversity of all learnings along the way. I have already provided an exhaustive list of what characteristic a typical solution consultant has to obtain and maintain, yet there are two little points which I can’t leave untouched.
Let’s be honest, a man can’t decide who to work with, and even worse than that, (s)he can’t decide who to work with from your client! 🙄 As much as you would prefer to be coupled with stakeholders who you go the best with, the truth of the matter is completely different. A consultant have to refer to a three dimensional communication matrix (relation — expertise — power) while planning and conducting interaction. Some stakeholders can be lovely to chat, while others not; or some stakeholders might contain the knowledge you need to obtain, while others are not. A solution consultant has to sort out what to communicate, whom to communicate, when to communicate and how to communicate. Furthermore, communication is not always uni-directional, sometimes a consultant has to detect the relevant and prevailing “source of truth”, to believe into in case of any conflict. Being judge of character or cold hearted pragmatist might not be the coolest occupational deformation you want to acquire, considering the discriminatory consequences that can deteriorate your private life.
Lastly, let me put it by not violating any GDPR legislation; for a consultant who enjoys an entrepreneurial mindset, everyday immense and super insightful data flows within arms reach, which none of entrepreneur would dare to consider or fantasize. So much data points, so much business models, so much benchmark cases… All is in a simple query distance and a little bit of zeal. The rest is upon you, and upon you alone!
As Giorgio Vasari noted down in his painting; “Cerca Trova” meaning “search and find”.

Wish you a pleasant day 👋
