Things I Learned

It has been an incredible busy and exciting two weeks. I felt like I learned more in the last two weeks than in entire semester at college. Part of this reason might be because I’m actually hungry to learn rather than passively attending classes. In any case, it was a great opportunity so let me delve in a bit further.

About two weeks ago, I was tasked by the Senior Executive (SE) to perform an IT Spend Analysis on our currently client. It would be a two week turnaround time with the SE giving most of the responsibilities to me. I was a little apprehensive about the whole project considering it would be presented to the CIO of our client rather than just general senior client executives. To make matters worse, the SE was going to be on vacation the entire week when I would be performing my analysis.

But the SE had given me pretty good guidance on who I could reach out to for information that I needed. In course of my analysis, I got a chance to work with Accenture Researchers, specialist in finding difficult to locate information to use for my benchmarking analysis. I also got to work with the consultant on my project o go over the IT Spend Analysis process to understand both how the work should be done in a conceptual model and what type of information the results for the analysis would provide to the client. Finally, I had the opportunity to operate independently without close supervision on conduction meetings with client executives and Accenture SE, deciding research results and analyzing key findings.

There were definite moments when I was stuck or unsure of how to handle the situation. One area that I’m working towards is building a better working relationship with lower level client personnel that I would work on in a daily basis. I find that I can’t build the same level of report as I would like to have. This definitely impacts the working relationship at times, but I’m unsure how better to proceed.

Another area where I think I’ll be able to improve next time is time management. After getting an idea of the turnaround time necessary for different types of work, I’ll be able to gauge how long it would take me to complete different amount of work.

On the following Monday, I got to present my findings to the CIO. It was definitely an interesting presentation. I had expected it would be more of my speaking followed by a question and answer section. But it was more of a conversation rather than presentation. We would talk about a slide for a few minutes with him asking questions and then move on to the next slide. It was during the presentation that I realized why being able to calculate numbers in your head quickly for percentages or in general was helpful because when the CIO asked for numbers outside my calculations, I was definitely stumbling along. Furthermore, there were some pretty significant mistakes in my presentation powerpoint that resulted in me second guessing a lot of my calculations. Thank goodness the SE was there to help.

While in the presentation, I realized that confidence in a presentation results both from experience and knowledge. Even though the SE didn’t do any significant amount of work, she trusted in my slides to pull out key results and interrupt them on the spot. She had already credibility and her knowledge of the operations of the client coupled with many years of experience was something I lacked. I simply wasn’t comfortable making any large recommendations because I didn’t believe in myself or the numbers and ideas that I had.

But this wasn’t the only analysis that kept me busy last week. I also did work examining the outsourcing provider’s offshoring initiative. Unlike the previous work, this required less financial analysis, but I utilized and honed many of the same skills as in my previous work. In the end, I enjoyed both work very much and was able to manage them quite well without doing too much over time.

Which makes me want to end on a note; I think working overtime isn’t necessarily a good think. It shows a failure in time management and project management skills. Given the time frame needed to complete certain tasks, it should be that there are one and off times between work and non-work. Managing those is part of the work/life balance. While an analyst has less control, it should be a skills that requires learning.