I often run into people in the CRM field who are very good at one or two things, they might be great programmers or a fantastic trainer. However, one of the skills I believe my customers appreciate that I bring to them is not the extreme depth in a certain field but a very good knowledge of many areas all concerning CRM. This ranges from subject as varied as management Consulting to nitty gritty network fixing, or just troubleshooting why that Outlook client won't work as it should.
And it is in troubleshooting that I think that the breadth of knowledge often does you most value as it helps me to back off from the problem and view it from a different perspective. I also believe that despite the fact that you might have a fancy business card, you should get your hands really dirty to understand what is really going on and what the people are the programmers or technicians are talking about.
And the most important thing about troubleshooting, make sure you have friends, you can never know it all, but with enough friends, there are no limits to what you can know and fix! The best way to get a friend help you in troubleshooting is to help them of course.
I have recently been working a lot with networking and trying to configure RRAS which we use at our lab Environment and I struck a wall and used the Power of social media to ask if there was anyone around that could lend a hand. Thankfully there was, my friend Pete McCollough came back and we met up at a cafe and after some collaborative troubleshooting we found the error and Pete said a wise word that I will remember and would like to share, that being
- Networking is not very complex, but extremely specific
Which he had to explain to me of course as I am only a half-wit. What he meant was that compared to for instance programming Networking is not in its architecture very complex, however, not two systems are identical and usually every component has some part that has been manually configured which turns the troubleshooting hard by trying to find your way around an unknown maze.
In this case I had simply forgotten that our hosting partner had a firewall that blocked 443 and 80 why no traffic got through. I had check the other Three firewalls that the traffic passed about 15 times, but that didn't matter. I so wished I had a debugger that worked for network traffic.
I was also informed that the following blog ranks this blog among the top 50 CRM blogs in the World which of course is very honouring. Maybe I am not a half-wit after all or maybe just lucky.
http://getvoip.com/blog/2014/06/23/great-crm-blogs
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
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