The following are tips for how you can help a performance consultant solve your issues faster:

1. Get The Expert Started Fast

Between one and five hours of every customer visit I have ever been on was wasted getting things ready for me to start working. Small things like waiting for my escort, getting past security, finding a place to sit, getting on the corporate LAN, signing NDAs, setting up logins, etc. all take time and delay getting started.

Before or while the expert is en route to you, do what you can to streamline the process of getting started. When you’ve got a problem, every minute counts.

2. Give Experts Occasional Privacy

It can be tempting to hang around outside experts all the time to learn new things. However, it is in your own best interest to periodically give them a chance to confer privately and give them a private space to talk to their home office experts.

Why? Out of your earshot they can confer frankly about your problem and hopefully come up with better solutions by:

- Talking freely to each other about what they do and don’t know.

- Brainstorming without worrying they look like idiots in front of you.

- Speaking candidly to their home office technical wizards about what they’ve observed, what they don’t know, and their current thinking about the root cause.

Put yourself in their shoes. If you had to fix a big problem at a key customer, wouldn’t you want some privacy as you sought advice and evaluated possible solutions?

3. Let Experts Lead The Initial Meeting

Every time I’ve visited a new company, people want to teach me how the system does its work. Depending on what level of detail freaks they are, this presentation can vary from useful to endless hours of brain-withering, data diarrhea. I try to make the best of this by planning an escape route. Just like in fire safety – every meeting should have at least two pre-planned exits.

What an expert really needs to know is transaction flow and the bird’s-eye view of what is going on. They are interested in where transaction streams converge - when all roads lead to Rome, it is often the case that Rome will be a bottleneck. They are also interested in where transactions need to wait for something from the slowest part of the system.

You might recall the Charlie Brown animated specials. Whenever the adults are talking all you hear is a trombone sound: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wahhhh. When listening to people talk about the fine detail of the inner-beauty of their application, that’s mostly what outside experts hear too. Many times I’ve listened to social queues and politely listened while the trombone played on. When presenting your application to the expert, let their questions and general interest lead your presentation and do not be offended when they seem disinterested in the beautiful minutia of your system.

Bob Wescott is the author of “The Every Computer Performance Book”.

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More information on this, and many other useful ideas, can be found in Wescott's book:

The Every Computer Performance Book

Bob Wescott, Author of "The Every Computer Performance Book" Joins the BSM Blog