My SA exprience continued…
One of the partners on our case was out to lunch with our ACI (associate consultant intern, a rising college senior who is also on the case) when he saw his Blackberry start vibrating on the table. He didn’t recognize the number but decided to pick up anyway. The voice on the other end of the line said hello and stated his name and before he even finished, our Partner recognized who it was, the CEO of our client. After exchanging pleasantries the CEO somewhat casually asked about the progress on the workstream that I had been working on. Fortunately we had recently briefed the Partner on our progress and he was more than adequately prepared to discuss the issues with appropriate expertise. While the client was certainly satisfied with the information he received, he asked to set up a more in-depth discussion on Bain’s progress to date for the following Thursday, kind of like a status check to understand our progress on all three workstreams.
I think it was American author Isaac Asimov (check that, Google thinks it was American author Isaac Asimov) who said “The only constant is change.” While I’m relatively certain that he wasn’t talking about management consulting, he might as well have been. As I’ve mentioned previously, we’ve actually spent weeks designing and getting buy-in for our approach. We had blown out week by week plans both to help guide our thinking as well as to hold ourselves accountable. Now all of the sudden we had less than a week to get a comprehensive review of our efforts to the CEO of our client. A further complicating factor was that our Manager was still enjoying his honeymoon (Mazel to him on the wedding) and would not be returning until Monday, meaning we’d have little time to get him up to speed and incorporate any of his suggestions. Game on indeed.
If there was a silver lining, it was that Bain’s general approach made it easier to deal with these sudden information requests. During the whole effort, we are instructed to always keep an eye out for the answer. While this may sound obvious (I mean, we are paid to come in and provide an answer) this involves maintaining and consistently updating a hypothesis of what the result will be. Thus even though we won’t be delivering our final findings until mid-September, we already have a pretty good idea of the direction that we’re going in mid-July.
We began cobbling together our presentation and condensing our weeks of in-depth work into just a few slides. We were consistently reminded that our audience was the CEO and he wasn’t interested in the specific IT architectural gaps of one system, he wanted a more holistic analysis and our presentation should reflect that. Even though it was the CEO who requested the check-up, it would be foolish to go directly to him with our work. We laid out a step-by-step review process whereby we would first brief our Partners on our findings, who would in turn take those insights to the head of IT Strategy and then to the CIO, incorporating feedback and suggestions along the way. This process also allowed us to get buy-in from key stakeholders (as well as make them feel like we weren’t just leaving them behind) and to ask any last second questions to ensure we had all the details down.
Unquestionably this “moving up the ladder” process has real value, but also means that we need to have our work 90% done by Tuesday, instead of Thursday (hello 4-hour long late night meeting invite). This may sound tough but if you’re really considering consulting, these turn out to be some of the best times. Sure team dinners, boat rides, offsites and the like are fun, but so are those nights when you order a big dinner, you loosen your tie a bit (I don’t wear a tie but if I did I imagine I would loosen it) and you get down to work. Sure it’s not always the most fun when you’re in the thick of it, but those nights end up being the nights that you look back on fondly in a strange sort of way. Those nights end up being the nights when you really bond with you team, and you don’t even realize it until weeks later.
I’m happy to report that we were able to put together a good product in time while still sticking to our earlier-defined plan of action. We were even told to go home early on Thursday evening because of the hard work we had put in earlier in the week. And getting an email from our manager saying the CEO update went GREAT (yes he used all capital letters) was some nice icing on the cake.
Filed under: Case team experience, Internships, Week in the life Tagged: Ask an Expert, Bain, Bain & Company, Business, Google, United States Image may be NSFW.
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