Consulting Trail

I recently started to make my PowerPoint presentations interactive which allows me to navigate from a section to another by clicking on the agenda. It adds style to the presentation and lets the audience know about the currently  section . It's not commonly used and not everyone likes them, but it's good to know how it's actually done. The steps to create similar template are as follow: (Note: This example was prepared on a macOS but it's very similar on Windows ) 1.  Open Slide Master under "View"  ( PowerPoint's Slide Master lets you customize your presentation’s fonts, headings, or colors and to apply them to all your slides). 2. Select the top slide and add regular rectangular shapes as shown below. 3. Right click on the shapes and select "Hyperlink". Next, select "This document" then the slide you want to link it to. 4. Close Slide Master and return to the regular slide presentation mode. You can...

There are basic skills that most consultants learn at the beginning of their career, among these skills, they learn how to prepare good quality slides in terms of content and design.  I will be sharing with you in this article few of my personal preferences on how to create good quality PowerPoint slides. Make it visual when possible It's true that many reports require writing and heavy-text but try to use images, graphs and charts whenever it's possible to break the monotony of words and make it easier and faster to understand. When the deliverable requires the heavy-text, make sure not to use these same slides when presenting your findings to the client, but prepare a new PowerPoint document    less wordy but more visual  just for that presentation. Patterns and  Perfection I think that beauty can be found in patterns, perfection and simplicity. The same thing applies for sliding. In fact, we feel satisfied when everything in the slides is aligned and h...

Most decision making should be based on logical approach, using data and methodologies, that is why consultants   often  use  evaluation forms as a tool to simplify decision making.  The evaluation forms are built on two main things: evaluation criteria and the weighting of each of those criteria. This tool can be used for  Benchmarking comparison, v endor selection, or  any other analytic decision making (business or personal such as buying a car/house, choosing a candidate -etc). I will describe below the steps to create an evaluation form and and I will share with you a basic example of how to compare a set of options. The steps to create an evaluation form are described as follow: 1. Creating the model     1.1. Select the key criteria which are important for the evaluation     1.2. Give a weighting to each criteria     1.3. Select which of those criteria have a positive or negative impact on the scoring 2. D...

You need as a consultant to gather information  directly  from  your client  in almost every project . I recently  interviewed  22 people within a week and needless to say it was consuming, but it's basically the best way to gather the information needed for the diagnosis. First of all, it's crucial  to be prepared  before conducting an interview, and once it's done, to quickly prepare a report. In between, you must ask the best possible questions in order to gather as much information as possible. Here few tips you can remember while conducting the interview: 1. Make sure your interviewee is aware about the scope of the project before the meeting by sending them a project description and the topics of the conversation. They will come better prepared. 2. Avoid asking questions you can answer yourself by just searching online or by reading their previous reports. 3. Start by laying out the different subjects you are interested to talk abo...

Most consulting reports are made with PowerPoint. It is not that easy to prepare nice looking slides and  at the same time to  have good quality content.  I prepared 10 questions to ask yourself every time you are writing a report to guide you through the process of preparing good quality content reports. Before 1. "Is the narrative of the report coherent?"  Before opening PowerPoint, make sure you write down the storyline and review it with your manager. T he storyline should be coherent and tells an actual story. 2. "Is the purpose of this slide clear?" Write the titles/leads/taglines of each slide. Do not leave any slide without a clear purpose in the presentation; you are not   paid by the number of words. It's also important for each slide to address one purpose, not multiple ones at the same time. While 3. "Will the reader be able to understand it?"   Put yourself in the reader's shoes. If  you think it is a bit confusing, wri...

Consultants will confirm that Excel and PowerPoint are the two main software solutions used in almost every project. In fact, PowerPoint and Excel have plugins which can improve your performance at work. PowerPoint ThinkCell Efficient Elements iSlide Flevy Power-user MLC PowerPoint Addin Office Timeline Excel Ablebits.com Excel add-in ASAP Utilities OpenSolver XY Chart Labeler Chart-Me The waterfall chart creator Peltier Tech Charts Others Evernote OneNote Power BI PowerPoint ThinkCell (Paid) If I had to chose only one plug-in to use among all others in my projects, I will pick ThinkCell. It's the add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint to create data-heavy presentations based on charts/diagrams. ThinkCell allows you to create complex charts and layouts, including Waterfall, Gantt and Marimekko charts, as well as process flows. It's estimated that ThinkCell saves you 70% of the time when working on charts. It also has other useful features e.g. ...

Consulting makes you love data. You will need as a consultant to gather data from different datasources and then try to make sense of them. Your client is often the main source of data, but it's possible that you will need to gather more information from other sources for benchmarking or other research activities. In fact, big consulting firms constantly invest large amounts of money gathering data, which is not always possible for smaller consultancies or independent consultants. This is why I am sharing with you in this article few of my favorite free data sources I often use for my projects. World Bank Open Data The world bank open data portal should be the the first stop for every consultant or researcher looking for financial and economical data about a country. Many of the projects I have been working on are in the government and public sector, and the economies I am usually studying or analyzing are developing countries without sufficient available data online. ...