Good writing. When we say "Let me know how I can help", we are asking the other person to do work because then they have to think about what/how they need help with. Most of the times, people are lazy and you might be surprised but the fact is that they don't want to do work even for their own requirements. Instead, They want to hear solutions.
This even applies to environments at very big companies. At my current client (Fortune 100), we work with distributed global teams and we have those dreaded meetings all the time. In those meetings, we in IT will ask business for requirements which makes sense. However for projects that need quick turnarounds with tight deadlines, we sometimes don't have the luxury of getting detailed requirements. In fact, the more we discuss requirements, the more we are stuck. Asking "how I can help" usually gets a response of "Sure. what are you proposing". You cannot keep going back and forth with "depends on what you want". The reason is that even though we all would like the best solution with all features, it just does not work that way in real world because time/resource/budget is limited. Instead of asking "how can we help", we analyze the current process and then propose multiple options. So in essence, we say "Here is how we can help". It then makes it really easy for business to say "Yea we like Option 1 and if that's the best you have for now, let's go with it". Boom, you just got a decision maker to agree and you are on your way. You are also that guy who got shit done.
I used to think that we get big bucks as consultants because we are awesome devs/designers/PMs/BAs whatever. But after a decade in the industry, I got wiser. You are valued as a consultant because you get shit done by taking the initiative to propose solutions to clients. Then you deliver it to them. No one gives a shit about anything else. Really.
>people are lazy and you might be surprised but the fact is that they don't want to do work even for their own requirements.
And they will pay to avoid even the easiest chore. We got tired of not getting any response from people using our free trial and briefly required them to call us to activate their free trial. People started paying for the first month rather than make a phone call and some that paid never even used it. Crazy.
Isn't this the idea of a mail in rebate? That they attract attention and people buy the product but hardly nobody bothers to mail them in? I might be off base on that, but that was my thought as to why they are offered.
From my recollection, the industry stats on mail-in-rebates on (say) hard disks is something like 80% are unclaimed. Cutting a UPC out of the side of a box (and finding a stamp, and copying a tricky address exactly, etc) is a >$15 job for most people...
But for elementary school age me growing up with my poor single mom, when I could string rebates and sales together to build a computer inside $5 case with similar deals on components, it's crazy magic. Thank you lazy people, for making my childhoodd hobby (and the consulting career that has followed) possible.
> they don't want to do work even for their own requirements ...
Of course, and they shouldn't want to. They ought to be focused on providing business value to their clients. And hiring a consultant is a step taken when they're over their heads and need a hand.
This even applies to environments at very big companies. At my current client (Fortune 100), we work with distributed global teams and we have those dreaded meetings all the time. In those meetings, we in IT will ask business for requirements which makes sense. However for projects that need quick turnarounds with tight deadlines, we sometimes don't have the luxury of getting detailed requirements. In fact, the more we discuss requirements, the more we are stuck. Asking "how I can help" usually gets a response of "Sure. what are you proposing". You cannot keep going back and forth with "depends on what you want". The reason is that even though we all would like the best solution with all features, it just does not work that way in real world because time/resource/budget is limited. Instead of asking "how can we help", we analyze the current process and then propose multiple options. So in essence, we say "Here is how we can help". It then makes it really easy for business to say "Yea we like Option 1 and if that's the best you have for now, let's go with it". Boom, you just got a decision maker to agree and you are on your way. You are also that guy who got shit done.
I used to think that we get big bucks as consultants because we are awesome devs/designers/PMs/BAs whatever. But after a decade in the industry, I got wiser. You are valued as a consultant because you get shit done by taking the initiative to propose solutions to clients. Then you deliver it to them. No one gives a shit about anything else. Really.