Consultants often work with multiple clients at the same time.  Even when they work with a single client, they deal with a myriad of
documents information and schedule issues.  In this week’s podcast we will discuss why it is imperative for one's consulting career to be organized and to stay that way.

Is it more important for a consultant in particular to be organized?

As you mentioned, a consultant often times deals with multiple clients.  When that’s the case, the consultant needs to be able to keep these clients and their information separate.
As an example, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I had a situation once where I was in charge of five or six different clients.
It was a very hectic day.  I need to gather some data in some spreadsheets for each client.
It was the end of the day and I sent out each spreadsheet in separate emails to each client.  In my rush, I attached the spreadsheet of one client in the email of another.
I was very fortunate that the client who got the wrong file graciously responded saying she didn’t think it was her data, but she could have escalated that to my management and notified the other client.
If I had been in healthcare consulting I could have violated HIPAA laws.  Either way, that could have been what we used to call a CLM, or a career limiting move.
Another reason that a consultant needs to be organized is the client’s expectation that they always be on top of things.  When a consultant is organized, they know where things are and can quickly refer to them.  Whether that’s paper files they have in their desk or electronic files on their laptop.
And when you’re organized like that, you also are more organized in your head.  You can think more clearly and organize your thoughts as you communicate with your client.
One final reason that organization is important to a consultant is that we tend to be nomads.  Even if we have a single client at a time, when we are at a client site, even when they give us an office or a cubicle, it’s a temporary site.  You never just move in.  So it’s important to be organized because of that mobility.
My son is in high school and he has one teacher that doesn’t have a classroom.  They meet in another teacher’s classroom.  She teaches at two different high schools in the district and uses the classrooms of different teachers for her classes.  I was talking to him about that class and he said the teacher seems really disorganized.
 I wasn’t too surprised about that once I heard she doesn’t have a classroom.  She’s mobile and always on the run. She needs to be more organized than the typical teacher because of that.
And the same goes for mobile consultants.  They don’t have the luxury of the office with bookshelves and file cabinets.  They need to be much more nimble.

What consequences have you seen of a consultant being disorganized?

I once knew a woman whose desk was always literally covered with papers, strewn about to the point where you could not see the top of her desk.  When her manager commented about it, she defended herself that she knew where everything was.
Over time, he realized that that wasn’t the case.  She consistently asked him to resend emails that he had sent before and if he stopped by to ask for something, she would dig through the piles, wasting her time as well as her boss’s time looking for it.  And it was a 50-50 chance she would find it.
And it goes beyond just piles of paper.  I had a guy that worked for me once that kept all of his electronic documents in his ‘My Documents’ folder.  This is really the electronic version of the piles of paper on the desk.
I would ask him for a document from a certain client and he would peruse through his one and only directory looking for it.  He’d open one and say ‘No, that’s not it’ and keep looking.
Both of these people had a history of slow performance.  I heard complaints from clients that th