Scribbles

In the spirit of premature declarations of victory, I will borrow the phrase from our fearless leader to commemorate the conclusion of my first project as a consultant.  To further my argument, I also conducted my first set of interviews today, contributing to the big recruiting machine.  Yes, despite being here for only 3 full months, I actually do feel comfortable in my role.

Allow me to share with you my dislikes and likes of this past quarter.  The top three things I hate about my job involve expense reports, the staffing process, and US airport security.  Two of the three are rather self-explanatory.  I'll take a stab at describing the third, how we get staffed, a process nobody seems to understand.  As of now, I still don't know the who, what, when, where, how of my next project.  The only thing the higher-ups can tell me is that I've been staffed.  The reason they cannot tell me is because it can change any minute, and most of the time it does.  So instead of having me feeling like a pinball, I just have to endure utter uncertainty until the very last moment.  From the surface, it seems like an optimization problem.  There exist a set of projects and a pool of consultants and project leaders that are available.  The question is how to arrange them to maximize utilization, as well as aligning interests and expertise.  Seems straight-forward enough for a group of relatively intelligent partners to figure out, no?  Turns out, many clients are indecisive about agreeing to projects, start-dates, and resources.  There's also politics involved in this secretive partners only staffing meeting.  The end result is a complete lack of transparency, and the feeling of being just a pawn on the big chess board of consulting checkers.  Today I asked one of the partners which project I'm on, and the answer was, “I can tell you which project you're not on.”  Ugh.  I hate it.  Let me know what to do with my life already.

Enough carping.  What did I like and learn from this stint?  Some methodology, client-development, and storyboarding.  Skipping the first one, which isn't horribly exciting and would take 5000 words, I'll focus on the two latter skills.  Client-development is really the soft-skills side of things in the nebulous world of organizational behavior and psychology.  It's about encouraging, coaching, coaxing clients to become more effective in the context of the project.  While I didn't do too much of it, I can see quite clearly in them the areas that if improved upon, would make a big difference.  How to actually accomplish that is a different story.  Storyboarding is the fancy name I came up with for the only thing I like about PowerPoint slides.  It's the skill of building and telling a coherent and cohesive story within the limits of the dreaded Micro$oft software tool.  I can see it being compelling to me, because it's a form of story telling.  I try to see it in the light of improving my writing skills, albeit in a different medium.  Work in progress.

Takeaways – I'm feeling confident.  I received some good feedback from my very skilled project leader who happens to look out for me.  The bright side of all this is that all those long hours of work translated to just as much personal development as client contribution, if not more.  For all you potential INSEAD applicants, without a doubt, my MBA prepared me well for consulting. 

So to pat myself on the back for the past 3 months of hard work, I'm planning a stopover in London for a big birthday party on my way to Munich for training.  Knowing these two birthday stars, this is going to be one hell of a bash.  And if things work out ok, I'll make a pit stop in Frankfurt on the way back to visit some other INSEADers (assuming their staffing issues comes through ok),