The Consulting Toolkit

The Full Professional Consultants Toolkit

As an IT Consultant or Manager, you're expected to wear many hats... each one successfully! As you juggle the facets of your consulting and managerial role, it is essential to develop your business acumen. Without good business and administrative skills, your best plans will falter. Understanding the business goals of your enterprise and ensuring that the entire IT department team is in alignment with those goals is vital.

667 hours * $ 75= $ 50,025.00

Make your life easier with this dedicated IT consulting and manager resource and round out your consulting and management skills to include this expertise.

Learn from the best how to:

• Create IT departments that are well-aligned with an organization's business objectives
• Understand the relationship between an IT department's responsiveness and organizational agility
• Set effective project priorities and keep projects running as planned
• Measure IT performance accurately
• Better manage end-user expectations
• Build team loyalty
• Stretch technology budgets
• Improve communication with an organization's board members
• Expand your leadership skills within your department and throughout your organization!

Buy your copy of the IT Professional Toolkit to Managing and Consulting today!

No matter how much you know today, you'll have to know more tomorrow.

Contents:

In Ready to go Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations - all the information at your fingertips, ready for you to use.

69 documents
hundreds of presentation slides
numerous document pages and spreadsheets
 

Focus Interviews Sample pages

• Overview of the Focus Interview technique (25 slides)
• IT Focus Interviews Example of a Focus Interview related to the IT function (24 slides)
• IT Interview Details (20 pages)
• IT Interview Form (8 pages)
• The Five Whys is an interview technique that is used to drill down to the problem, rather than accept action around a symptom (10 slides)

Process Engineering Sample pages

• Value chain analysis disaggregates a firm into its strategically relevant activities in order to understand the behavior of costs and the existing and potential sources of differentiation (4 slides)
• Customer requirements analysis a method for analyzing and describing customer requirements for the process (3 slides)
• Client archive analysis to determine the flow time of processes by using records in client archive (2 slides)
• Overall process charting gives a high level view of what a company is doing (10 slides)
• Process walkthrough a method to gain knowledge about the cross-functional / customer oriented perspective of a process (2 slides)
• Time analysis as a basis for generating new ideas for process designs (3 slides)
• Change profile describes the AS-IS situation, the Early Wins as well as the intermediate and final TO-BEs (6 slides)
• Process analysis forms to gather a lot of information about processes (10 slides)
• Workflow The use of workflow in Process Development workflow demo (41 slides)
• Brown Paper Charting a workshop to describe and discuss how processes work (24 slides)
• Brown Paper Fair an event that mobilizes the client organization (6 slides)

Workgroup Skills Sample pages

• Effective meetings organizing and managing meetings (19 slides)
• PS-TB Problem Solving - Team Building (24 slides)
• Metaplanning a democratic, participant-centered method for problem-solving, idea-generation and decision-making (4 slides)
• Facilitation managing a group-work (15 slides)
• Affinity Process a method for obtaining consensus on an issue that is not fully understood by a group (23 slides)

IT Diagnostics Sample pages

• Overview of IT diagnostics (5 slides)
• Business Alignment diagnostics about the alignment between business and IT Strategic Alignment to determine how well IT goals, objectives and activities are in alignment with Company business strategies and objectives (18 slides)
• Strategic Alignment-Form the questionnaire (7 pages)
• Strategic Alignment-Analysis the spreadsheet (1 spreadsheet)
• Initiatives Assessment to analyze and assess the alignment of the key IT initiatives with the business and IT strategies (15 slides)
• Initiatives Assessment-Form the questionnaire (4 pages)
• Initiatives-Analysis the spreadsheet (1 spreadsheet)
• Project Business Cases Analysis of Business Cases for IT Projects (9 slides)
• User Satisfaction to assess how satisfied the customer base is with the level of service being provided by IT (17 slides)
• User Satisfaction-Form the questionnaire (4 pages)
• User Satisfaction-Analysis the spreadsheet (extensive spreadsheet with charts)
• Financial Analysis to identify how much the IT organization and its customers are spending (28 slides)
• IT Organization and Processes diagnostics related to the IT function
• Activity Analysis to provide quantifiable information on the use of IT staffing resources (17 slides)
• Activity Analysis-Form (2 pages)
• Project Review to determine the time, effort, risk, management and quality of IT projects (12 slides)
• Project Review-Form (18 pages)
• Management Practices how is the IT department managed? (12 slides)
• Management Practices-Form (14 pages)
• Tools and Methods to assess the state of the delivery environment (10slides)
• IT Service Unit Analysis assessment of cost, way to work and technology used (16 slides)
• Systems Assessment diagnostics on applications and the technical infrastructure
• System Manager Interview A standard interview questionnaire for the IT Manager (4 pages)
• Systems Analysis (2 spreadsheets)
• Quality Summary analysis of FQ and TQ of IT systems (27 slides)
• Functional Quality-Form (7 pages)
• Functional Quality-Analysis (3 spreadsheets)
• Technical Quality-Form (6 pages)
• Technical Quality-Analysis (1 spreadsheet)
• Systems Architecture assess how effectively the architecture supports the value chain and the business processes (22 slides)
• Technical Environment Identify and communicate the "As Is" Technical Environment and assess its ability to enable applications software to meet changing business need (11 slides)

Change Management Sample pages

Task-based teams - About teamwork in projects (18 slides)

Understanding change A general introduction about change management (27 slides)

Overcoming resistance To understand resistance to change and steps to take to deal with it (20 slides)

Coaching How to coach and give feedback (31 slides)

General Techniques Sample pages

• DILO Day In the Life Of analysis (20 slides)
• PDSA Plan-Do-Study-Act: Turning data into knowledge and hence competitive advantage, through action (14 slides)
• Best practices Benchmarking inside one company (9 slides)
• KPI Key Performance Indicators and Performance Tracking (11 slides)
• SWOT Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats, a general technique for competitive analysis (3 slides)
• Business impact matrices to evaluate opportunities and issues (3 slides)
• Role spiders a technique to describe and analyze roles and responsibilities (2 slides)
• Critical success factors I/S planning technique to focus attention in strategy implementation (2 slides)
• Pareto charting the 80/20 rule (3 slides)
• Organization development Quick and Simple Management and Organization Development (7 slides)
• Cause-effect diagram Quality management, also known as Ishikawa or fishbone diagram (2 slides)
• Core competencies Strategy definition, more based on own strengths than on competitor analysis (3 slides)
• RACI Responsibility Charting (21 slides)

Software Tools Sample pages

• Tools Introduction What kind of software tools can support the manager/consultant (6 slides)
• Modeling and simulation An introduction (19 slides)