Many technical companies use the services of external technical experts called advisors. I want to describe the best technical advisory workflow beneficial for both sides.

Communication

Both sides need to start by establishing contact. You can share your experience, explain your internal processes, talk about team members, or even discuss today’s weather. You need to get familiar with the other side to work with it for a long time.

One of the most crucial aspects of communication is transparency. So, if you are an advisor, you should clearly describe your experience, what you can and can not do, and your vision of further cooperation. If you belong to the company that requested the advisory, you need to share your experience, understand the gaps the advisor has, and work as one team to solve your issues. When both parties know the strengths and weaknesses of each other, they can plan further cooperation and precisely predict the outcome.

Business Value

Although technical advisory is first and foremost about technical support, you need to start from the business side anyway.

If you requested the advisory, you need to clearly explain the business value of the areas where advisory is required. This way, you can share your vision of the product and outcome, and the advisor can show you the right direction. If you are an advisor, make sure you understand business cases first. They can give you lots of hints, show what the company wants to achieve, and how it benefits from it.

One of the crucial aspects of business value is customer success. The company that requested the advisory should explain its marketing strategy, show potential customers, what customer segments it wants to target now, and how it plans to expand customer coverage. The advisor has to analyze all this information and offer a solution that helps all current customers and is flexible enough to cover new potential customers’ needs.

Technical Support

Finally, you can start doing what the technical advisory is about: technical support!

One of the typical recommendations the company expects from the advisor is architectural advisory. An advisor has to offer a stable and flexible solution that suits all customer needs. Usually, the advisory also includes technical documentation that describes the approach and best practices. The company has to evaluate the proposed architecture, check if it will work from a long-term perspective, and make sure they follow the recommendations.

In some cases, an advisor may require deeper investigation. For example, the company can not predict the expected load, and there are no related statistics. So, the advisor or the company’s employer has to collect the information to provide recommendations. Such investigation often includes technical and business teams, and both teams can share the data and vision of the solution.

The advisor often provides proofs of concept (prototypes) to demonstrate how to follow the recommendations. It is crucial if companies’ employees lack experience in some areas. The company may explicitly ask for proof of concept and even write documentation if needed.

These are best practices for organizing technical advisory workflow and interaction between the advisor and the company. Getting used to them may take time and effort, but the result will be worth it!