Working as a consultant

When I first started working as a consultant which was no more than a few months back, I was told that the it is about taking the client on a journey.

So, what are my experiences about being a consultant as compared to working as an engineer in a product company.

1) As a consultant you need to know contractual and time limitations. You should be able to make a decision on whether something can be done or not. While in a product company there is a lot more team involvement in what needs to happen.

2) You need to be more professional in terms of the assignments that come across. This is to do with right from time management to documentation to communication with the stakeholders. In a product company, it again goes down to the team that you work for especially in an agile environment.

3) More responsibility on individuals rather than the team. If things go wrong the blame goes to the consultant rather than the team.

The above are general observations.

Working with people

I consider myself as a individualistic person. Working alone on a challenging assignment is an ideal situation I thrive in. However, working with people is an important aspect of finishing a work on time and with better quality. So here are a few situations I have faced and perhaps how I should have handled them.

1) You are new in a job and are struggling with the process, tools and the setup and end up slowing down the schedule.
- Calm down, its common to be struggling in a new assignment unless you are a genius. For a guy like me who is not the fastest learner, I would suggest putting in extra hours, gaining confidence, being thorough with new things encountered today and reflecting on what went wrong.

2) You are dedicated to get the job done with high quality, however the one with you lacks motivation.
- Do your best. Try and help out whenever needed but only when your tasks are completed. I say this as it has been noticed many a times that people blame others when things go wrong but take credit when things go right. Hence it is important to finish your own work before helping out unless you are sure of the colleague you are working with. It can also be frustrating when dealing with people who act that they are working but in reality are only working for the final paycheck and expect blockages so that work can be procrastinated. Try and avoid arguments, escalate if things don't happen as it should be to achieve high quality objectives.

3) Work place politics, jealousy.
- It is very difficult for humans to robots (LOL) hence politics, jealousy and other such resistance is best avoided by focusing on the goals. This may make you fewer friends but would surely make you work better. However, it may be difficult to be neutral when the problems at work involve you as well. It is best to remind yourself what your duties at work are and stay professional at the place you are paid to do a job.

Load test crashed - Load Runner

Many a times we see that the load test crashes due to various environmental or test tool related factors. A Good part about Load Runner to what I used to work on is the reporting.  Hence most of the times when crashes occur and the results files tend to not have the stop times. Hence there tend to be errors while opening the analysis files.

Fix the error by opening the lrr file in a text editor and add the stoptime parameter as the current unix epoch time. Here is one link to find the same.