Work (general)

General post about work because day to day really isn’t exciting. First week and a half I was just reading information. So Accenture is helping Vodafone switch their billing and customer related software. This means basically all of their processes are changing- the way they bill, provision, sell, deal with disputes, orders, etc all is slightly different now. So I had a lot of reading to catch up on- both on the old system and the new system. The team I’m working on is creating the new business processes- meaning what the users have to do now with the new system to execute commands/accomplish the necessary tasks.

After all my reading I started designing IT Maps. She gave me a design document (a word document in which the fields/general steps of a process are written) and downloaded Microsoft Visio from the Accenture website for me. Then she showed me some examples and told me to create a visio for a process. I had no idea how to use visio or how to extract the information (what level of detail, what to fill the gaps with etc). So I spent a little while figuring out visio and playing with the IT Maps. At first I got a sizable amount wrong. By now I can create a map in sometimes 30 minutes (usually it take an hour or two unless I have previous drafts to work on). Now I make the initial draft, it gets reviewed a few times and edited, they ask me to edit it/see if I catch anything, then I format it. I’ve gotten pretty good at visio- especially with all the formatting. Now people ask me how to do stuff on visio or to explain the processes sometimes- which is cool.

Also- a lot of the processes now are still in the barely designed phase meaning that sometimes I actually get to BS (well logically try to figure out) what the steps should be. If they think my logic/steps are solid then those get to be the processes all Vodafone users have to follow- which is really cool. It's interesting because it seems that in consulting most people have a general idea of the field they're in (for accenture it's IT) and then don't really know anything. So they teach themselves about the project. It makes it cool being an intern because, even though I obviously don't have the same experience, in terms of specific knowledge I have access to the same material/learning base as the actual consultants.

Tanya sometimes has to work on another project so now I work with Tanya, Maria, and Harris- all of them are really nice. Maria is very young- probs 24. Maria joined the project about three weeks after me (per my early observation this means there isn't as much of a disparity between our knowledge/familiarity with the system, Tanya's been working on this project for over a year through many phases so knows a lot more). Earlier, work slow so I also helped Chrysanthi (I entered about 400 tests onto a website- serious pain). I’ve also gotten addicted to reading the NYT/browsing project guttenberg (yea sherlock holmes!) during downtime because they are one of the few sites that’s not blocked (the mysterious vodafone big brother noticed i was on blogger for a long time and it got blocked as a blog the day i created Go Big (or Go Home) but now it's unblocked...wonder how long my luck will hold). I haven’t had much free time in July because they’re having client meetings now and things are really rushed (a person across from me stayed here till 4 am one day). So I have to keep designing the flows, editing the ones before meetings, and editing the ones post the feedback. Usually the most downtime comes when they're meeting with the users (like today) or reviewing the documents (then I have to wait for the feedback). So it’s been pretty busy.

Also I was assigned to draft the training approach document. Part of the Change Enablement is training the new users. I was given 3 pages of information and told to create a 20-25 page document with very minimal direction. After not being able to bullshit past 4 pages I asked where I could find more information. So I had to go onto the Accenture website and look at past training approach designs. I’ve now compiled them/created a 28 page document. It’s really cool because I know this is just a draft and they’re going to change it a ton but this is the main deliverable for the first stage of training and what the rest of training is based on- and I got to do it. Work also has cool events. I don't know why but one day they had a dj, soccer goal house, air hockey, and some members of the greek soccer team signing vodafone hats. I guess it was an employee morale event/world cup excitement event? I got a hat for dad. this was before the world cup.

Then a few weeks ago was the date vodafone had been founded so they celebrated vodafone's '17th birthday' with free ben and jerry's. they had strawberry, fairly nuts, fudge brownie, and chocolate chip cookie dough- unlimited scoops. I had fairly nuts and chocoalte chip cookie dough (I had just gotten fudge brownie on a walk that week).

we've also gotten free ice tea, energy drinks (I joked with Marj I get energy drinks and free coffee, she gets free pastries and fruit at work), hats, lanyards, and cow bells (part of some new marketing push? unclear).vodafone is similar to southwest in that it has a very young set of employees and a distinct corporate culture- they try to make it a good/fun place for young people to work which is nice.