Three Good Laboratory Informatics Consulting Habits
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
I might have mentioned this or it might have been somewhat obvious, but I’m currently mainly working on a large Clinical LabWare LIMS implementation. One part of my job is to analyze requirements and propose a technical solution to them and the write the LIMS Basic that will fulfil the requirement.
As it happens, LabWare also has some of their people on the project and I happened to be having supper with one of them, last night. One topic that came up was the topic of how to be a good consultant to your customers. While this is neither an exhaustive list nor does it even cover every item we covered during our conversation, here are three things that consultants should be doing to give the best service they can to their customers:
1. Give customers advice then leave them to decide whether to take it or not. Don’t be offended if they don’t take every bit of advice that you give them. If they did that, that would be a mistake because, no matter how good you are, no-one is right 100% of the time. Thus, there will be advice we give that will be wrong and it’s good for a customer to be considering our advice not just blindly following it.
2. Programming solutions should be elegant but not overly clever. Once a consultant is gone, everything they’ve done should be able to be supported by someone else. When you come up with something that’s super-clever, it sometimes is so cryptic that it’s not obvious what it does. Whatever you do, when you’re writing code, try to be obvious, both by using the simplest solution possible, as well as putting in sufficient code comments and the like.
3. Work for the good of the project. Consultants who can’t work with consultants from other companies don’t do justice to their projects. It’s true that each company is in competition with each other to keep their resources on projects. However, when you’re working on a project, consultants need to spend their time, well, actually working on the project. Those people who spend their time on politicking to keep their company in over someone else’s and who won’t work equally with the entire team to move the project forward might be advancing their own goals, but are not helping the project meet its goals. Considering that advancing the project’s goals is the reason most consultants tend to be getting paid to be there, if that’s not a person’s #1 goal, they don’t belong there.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/