Transitioning into a Management Role
/I’ve now been with Accenture for 5 years, and it feels I’ve grown more in this past year than in the 4 that preceded. I finally aligned myself to Visual Intelligence & Analytics, led analytics for a technology product at the highest valued company in the world, taught myself 3 new technology skills, and helped expand my team-of-one to a team-of-four. In hindsight, it is easy to summarize all I have done in a single sentence but these results and the growth I have experienced have been the products of a year’s worth of personal and interpersonal development.
Transferring into VI&A
The decision to leave the CloudFirst practice last year was a difficult one, and was made after weighing what I love to do against my immediate desire to move up within Accenture. I had experience with leading report development, integration configuration, and training new resources but realized that a promotion to Manager within that practice would solidify my place as an Implementer of Workday. I could not envision myself practicing HRIT long-term and wanted to expand my skillset beyond just Workday Reporting.
What I did enjoy while with Workday was the data analytics component of my work and leveraging analytics to drive business decisions. I communicated this interest to my previous Career Counselor who was more than supportive, and I started networking in the Bay Area to align myself with a project that could facilitate the transition. I forwent an annual 10% bonus and a potential promotion to pursue what I loved to do. The work I have delivered while at Apple has validated that this was the right decision.
Executive Reporting at Apple
My responsibilities at Apple were not that of a typical consultant position. To start with, the Video Analytics Team was just myself and 1 Apple counterpart with the work evenly divided between the two of us. This nudged me into a position where I had to work directly with client stakeholders (i.e. managers & directors) to guide business decisions. And when my Apple counterpart left the company, I had to again adapt and learn new tools in order to ensure continuity within the business (i.e. pyspark, splunk, python).
Having taught myself these skills, I assumed responsibility for executive reports & the launch reports for LATAM, EMEA, and Carpool Karaoke Programming and automated what I could to maximize my bandwidth for other tasks. I supported analytics for studio negotiations (i.e. Sony, Fox, Warner Bros, Disney) and for a period, I was the primary point of contact for Video Analytics across the Marketing Team, the Business Team, and International Sales Teams until the client hired a new Video Analytics Manager.
Growing the Team Beyond Myself
From my time as a consultant, my primary focus had been to improve myself and to maximize my contributions. While I certainly feel these aspects benefited my career, the concept of company & teamgrowth has only come through maturing over the years through multiple roles and multiple projects.
It was at Apple that I, for the first time, was entrusted with the independence to define my own work and client relationships. It was through these relationships that I gained an understanding into how my deliverables directly corresponded to the success of the business. The more I did, the more I learned; and the more I learned the more I could do. Eventually, I came to realize that despite holding the knowledge necessary for delivering quality work, there was a limit to the insights I alone could deliver.
I proceeded to create a series of Job Aids through a shared document tool. These documents served as a step-by-step guide to run any of the executive reports I managed and provided links to past scripts I had worked on. My focus shifted from “what can I do now” to “how can I sustain the business for the long term”. But while the documents were helpful for Apple employees, the Video Analytics Team was still understaffed. We needed a team that could collectively offer new solutions through new perspectives.
I approached the Video Analytics Manager and the Accenture Senior Managers to explain that the addition of 2-3 consultants could greatly increase the impact of the Video Analytics Team. The client approved, and I have been training the new wave of Video Product Analysts through a series of documents, sample scripts, and knowledge transfer sessions. Additionally, I have led KT sessions to train the larger Accenture Team (Music & Apps) on how to leverage Pyspark & Hadoop for clickstream analysis in hopes that this can expand our future contributions.
Accenture has always aimed to deliver quality results for its clients, but I realize now that effectiveness is multiplied when we shift from functioning as individuals to functioning as a team. I am looking forward to building strong teams in the years to come.