Lessons Learned from a Short-Term Consultancy Project

A few weeks ago, I had the incredible opportunity to work on a short-term consultancy project (~2 weeks) as the sole data consultant. Coming out of our 4-months intensive training where we did client projects in a team of 8, this was a whole different experience! Here are some of my takeaways, experiences, and lessons-learned.


Everything Everywhere All At Once

The first notable difference was that all the responsibility was now on me. You couldn't share tasks among each other anymore. You had to wear all kinds of different hats:

  • Project Manager
  • Data Analyst
  • Dashboard Designer
  • Presenter
  • Communicator
  • Time Manager

Wearing all of these hats significantly changes how you should scope and set the priorities for this project. I underestimated how much time certain tasks would take up, such as preparing slides for the final presentation, writing emails, or verifying the data. When you are in a team, you can work in an agile manner where multiple tasks can be completed at the same time. However, if you are the only person on the project, some tasks cannot be started before another one is completed ("waterfall"). This takes up more time than I had anticipated.

You will also have to account for the spotlight in meetings and final presentations being all on you. My final presentation (where I presented all my work from the past 2 weeks to a group of stakeholders), took about 1.5 hours including walking through dashboards & sketches, highlighting data inconsistences, providing data recommendations, and answering questions. The advantage is that you know all the data really well, but the disadvantage is that all the questions will be directed to you!

Having that long of a presentation also requires more preparation and rehearsing than what we had done in training where we only walked through our built dashboards in 10 minutes. I did a rehearsal presentation with one of our amazing team members, but that alone took up more than an hour.

Again, everything takes up more time than when working in a team 😄

Here are a few more lessons that I learned from those weeks:

Scope well

Yes, you have heard it a lot, the #1 data consultant skill is to scope well. However, this significantly changes whether you work in a team or by yourself. Working in a team, you can always shift things around, pivot, or it isn't as obvious if the scope needs to be adjusted for one person out of eight people. However, when working by yourself, you are responsible for your scope and it will be very clear at the end if you did not deliver.

Always underpromise and overdeliver!

One advice that helped me was to write out the scope and priorities at the beginning as specific as possible, including potential stretch goals, and then use this as a To-Do List throughout the week while also sending it to the stakeholder who will know what I am working on and whether that is in line with the main ask.

Always Over-Prepare

Overpreparing for me means to look at the data before the Kickoff call, prepare questions for update calls, and rehearse transitions or how you would handle difficult questions.

This also comes back to organization. Try to be as organized as possible from the start. Have your files in a specified folder and not simply in your "Downloads" folder. Think about ways to document your work before you do any work. Send update emails, meeting links, and summary emails to the stakeholder to be transparent what you are currently working on. Maybe send an agenda or questions before a longer meeting so that the stakeholder can prepare.

For update calls, I would definitely recommend writing down the things you definitely need to get answered whether those are data or conceptual or business questions. You may also want to prepare a flow that makes sense rather than randomly asking your questions and jumping from one topic to another and back to the first topic. Instead, you could group them by different dashboards or larger categories.

In one of my update calls I had questions grouped around:

1) Data inconsistencies

2) Feedback on Dashboard sketches

3) Administration/Organization

Asking questions and being prepared also goes back to not being satisfied with the first answer you receive. If you prepare your questions, think about what kind of answer you would need to move forward. If the stakeholder only gives you a vague answer or doesn't quite get to your desired answer, ask a bit deeper or in a different way. Maybe rephrase the question.

Focus on Main Ask

It is so easy to be distracted by other things you see that need improvements within those short consultancy projects. But you won't be able to fix/improve it all, and you certainly won't have the time to do it all.

Always keep the Main Ask and your priorities in mind and use that to guide your work. You may want to take note of any other things you see that could use improvements, but don't waste time on them and more importantly do not lose time from your main priorities.

It sounds easy to say, but it can be hard to actually do.

For example, in my short-term consultancy project the main ask was to bring in new data to supplement existing dashboards. The priorities were to build 5 dashboards (2 newly built, 3 revamped). Some of the dashboard used calculations that didn't make sense and some data fields were used as placeholders resulting in numbers being repeated across the dashboard where it didn't make sense. At the beginning I briefly fell into the perfectionism trap of trying to find the right data values for those placeholders, trying to understand and improve the calculations, and to even create new calculations. But after bringing up some of these issues with my stakeholder, I realized that the aim of this project was not data integrity or data consistency. If that would have been the case, my attempts would have been right on target. But the aim was to bring in a different data source and combining the data. And that is what I then focused on. I left the placeholders where they were, I used the previous calculations as much as possible, as I did not attempt to write whole new calculations beyond what was important for the 2 dashboards that I built from scratch.

Doing this allowed me to stay on track with MY goal which I was hired for and the stakeholder was satisfied at the end.


What are some important lessons you have learned from short-term consultancy projects? Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know!

Feature Image by Brands&People / Unsplash

Author:
Lisa Hitch
Powered by The Information Lab
1st Floor, 25 Watling Street, London, EC4M 9BR
Subscribe
to our Newsletter
Get the lastest news about The Data School and application tips
Subscribe now
© 2025 The Information Lab