Many people who once thought of themselves as subject matter experts are now asked to be internal consultants. Regardless of your field, being a consultant means “using expertise, influence, and personal skills to facilitate a client-requested change without the formal authority to implement recommendations.” It’s not enough anymore simply to offer advice or to implement policies. Being an internal consultant requires you to provide real value to the business or organization in which you live and work. In their book, Consulting on the Inside: A Practical Guide for Internal Consultants, second edition, Beverly Scott and B. Kim Barnes discuss a set of internal consulting competencies.
As the copyeditor for this book, I worked with the authors for several weeks to prepare the manuscript for publication. In this situation, I worked with the lead author to finalize the manuscript and prepare it for publication. Working with multiple authors on the same manuscript can pose additional challenges, but these authors followed the guidelines I laid out, and as a result, the process moved forward efficiently.