The local farm is not accessible

Every now and then when I run my SharePoint PowerShell scripts I’m getting the following error:

The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered.

I keep forgetting about the solution so I thought I create my favourite type of blog articles. A short blog article.

Making a user Shell Admin

So I need to make my user a Shell admin with this command

Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName CONTOSO\User1

Easy, I start my SharePoint Management Shell and run the above command and … my next error:

You need to have machine administrator privileges to run this cmdlet

Don’t forget to run the shell as an administrator with the run as administrator option.