March 5, 2007

8:30 AM - 4:45 PM

Level: Business

As every data professional knows, the toughest part of the job is engaging the business: understanding their requirements, winning their support, and meeting their expectations. These are consulting skills – and even if you’re "only" providing services within your own organization, you’re a consultant – like it or not! And many of the techniques that the best external consultants use are equally relevant to you. In this workshop, Graeme will share principles, techniques and tips learned from 20 years of building and managing a successful consultancy.

He’ll show you how to:

•  Gain a deeper understanding of business needs and priorities
•  Define high-value projects and gain business buy-in
•  Negotiate and manage expectations
•  Deal with problems – and difficult people
•  Build effective long-term relationships

This is a heavily interactive workshop, with time set aside for discussion of case studies and issues raised by attendees. We should add that external consultants, particularly those working independently, have also found Graeme’s consulting skills workshops valuable!

Graeme Simsion is one of the best known and most influential voices in the data management field. Always controversial, always prepared to question the conventional wisdom, and his own ideas as well, he is identified with some of the most important ideas and trends in data administration and data modeling over the past decade. He built and managed a successful consultancy which grew to some 70 staff covering IS planning, process re-design and systems specification as well as data management and data modeling. During this period, he continued to take on consulting assignments himself, primarily facilitating business and technology planning at the senior management level. Graeme enjoys a reputation as an outstanding and entertaining communicator. His book, Data Modeling Essentials (Morgan Kaufmann), now in its third edition, is widely regarded as the clearest work on the topic.