Jeffrey McManus

I’ve been doing a bunch of consulting this year and working on some really fun projects. Unfortunately we don’t always have the opportunity to talk about the projects we’ve been working on (we generally keep our engagements very confidential until they’ve launched). Most of the engagements we took on this year are longer-term projects, so we’ve been heads-down on that.

One of the sites that we launched last month is a customer and developer portal for our client LogLogic. LogLogic makes appliances that help businesses manage and analyze all kinds of log data. In our engagement with them we provided strategic advice on their platform product plans as well as content engineering for their new community site.

One of the things that I’ve been most excited about the stuff that we’ve done this year is the opportunity to put together teams to do new things for our clients. When I returned to consulting in 2007 the business consisted mostly of me doing mostly “pure” consulting — talking through business and product plans, evaluating clients’ existing programs and recommending ways to make them better, and so forth. Now we’ve grown to the point where we have the bandwidth to manage several engagements at once and perform some of the more involved tactical activities (such as the content engineering we did for LogLogic).

This is great for our clients but also great for me since I’m one of those people who has an impulse to create stuff and I’m not completely happy unless I’m doing that. This is also one reason why the annual late-summer lull is somewhat maddening to me; I know I should appreciate the downtime but I feel like I had an awesome summer this year and I’d much rather be cranking on work stuff now.

As for the consultancy itself, we just launched a spiffy new Platform Associates web site as well with information on our various consulting practices. It’s got a new design and we’ve moved it to a content management system so it’s easier to update; we’ve already started adding a few posts and upcoming events to the home page.

I’m going to use the late-summer lull to add a few new consulting products to the site, including a low-cost quick-hit consultation that’s specifically intended for smaller businesses and start-ups: the basic idea is to make it easy for businesses we’ve never worked with before to get a few hours of advice or help on a specific, targeted project without having to go through the rigamarole (or cost) of “hiring a consultant”.

Related posts:

1. Consulting Madness
2. In Santa Barbara This Summer
3. Consulting Update