One sign that I’ve been at Accenture for a year is my new role as mentor to one of our client staff members. This role exists to support our Knowledge Management (KM) efforts, which seek to prepare State staff with knowledge and experience necessary to maintain our statewide child support system after the project’s completion. You can read more about KM at Accenture here.

As mentor I’m expected to understand the protégé’s background, role, capabilities and needs, identify new goals and development activities, assist in achieving goals and provide feedback. This role is significant because it shows that management has faith in my ability to coach and relate to others, and views me as successful.

I am so excited to report that we deployed our software this Wednesday. Like Jackie, I’ve been on my project for the Build, Test, and Deploy phases, and I feel a surge of pride that we completed the task. We spent days finding and fixing out of the box and enhancement errors – but we feel confident that we’ve eliminated all of them. There have been a number of late nights for my Accenture team, testing the code changes and reworking our configuration, and we’re savoring the sweet satisfaction of completion.

However, our work is not done! Our software is deploying in two releases – so on Monday, I will move, with the rest of my team, to the second round of Build, Test, and Deploy, which will be twice as long as our first release. I will probably be in my new role through the end of the year.

I un-tack an autographed Jeff Martin poster from my cube that has hung there for the past eight months and discard it. No, I am not a Jeff Martin fan, but, the poster made me smile. Today is my last day here in Vancouver on the client site. Time to clean out the cube, say goodbye, and move on to the next project. Every step, every process we have completed has been documented. We have successfully priced and assisted in the pricing of 16 departments, for two different brands.

What’s the hardest part about leaving? Well, for me, not only is it going to be difficult to leave our AMAZING client team; but all the other Accenture friends I have made here; the remarkably kind and accommodating hotel staff; and more importantly, the person I spent almost every hour of every day with for the past eight months: my manager.

With Earth Day being this Sunday, I’ve heard a lot of talk around the office, on the radio, etc. about this lovely planet we call home. I was curious about the nature of Earth Day, so I looked it up. The holiday marks the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere, shares a birthday with some interesting folks, and played a large part in modern environmentalism.

I was glad to read yesterday about Accenture’s “green” facilities in Boston and San Francisco, our office-supply recycling efforts that also generate funds for a worthy cause, and more. I look forward to seeing more like this in the future.

One question plagues the mind of all new analysts and business analysts alike. “What does a typical day consist of?” The truth of the matter is, in the world of consulting, no day is typical. Everyday consists of different challenges and tasks. To me, that is one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Variety. Start to finish… here is what yesterday looked like on my project:

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007:

I remember playing Monopoly with my family when I was eight years old. I would neatly tuck all my Monopoly money under the edge of the board, and leave it there. When my fifth turn came around, and I had still not purchased any properties, my parents began to question my intentions and whether or not I truly understood the game. “Sweetie, why aren’t you buying anything?” my mom would ask. “I don’t want to lose my money.” I would reply. By about my 15th turn, I went bankrupt from all my rent expenses. Lesson learned. Some times you have to lose money in order to make it. To this day, no one in my family will play Monopoly with me. My strategies and tactics have somewhat differed.

One of the most important things I have been able to take away from this project, is the significance of looking at process and categories as a whole. “Why is this particular product going to take a hit in margin?” a merchant asked me yesterday. I can safely explain to him today, that if we look at the category in its entirety, by taking a hit on less profitable products, we are able to push volume to those that maintain higher margin standards for the company. Losing money to make money. Such an odd phenomenon.

After a few days of vacation, I am feeling refreshed. It’s a good thing, because our deployment date has been moved back a few weeks. Due to circumstances beyond the control of my Accenture team, we’ve had to push things back a bit on our project. We’re still working on the testing phase of the release. My week’s responsibilities are split between testing the software for bugs & usability and working with Change Management to develop training for our future users.

Testing the software means that I am running through our test scripts, which our team put together a few months ago. Each enhancement and interface that our developers built has a set of business requirements to meet. The test scripts break down those requirements on a step-by-step level, and I run through each step to ensure that we get the outcome that we expected. I am working on these scripts with a client counterpart; we both run through all of the scripts and compare our results at the end. From there, if we have errors, we meet with the developers to let them know where we encountered problems and whether we were able to work around the problem or if we had to restart completely.

It’s that time of year! Accenture employees will receive feedback in the coming months based on their performance over the last year.

Accenture has a well-developed performance management process, which ensures business goals are met, we receive timely feedback, and we have a clear understanding of individual performance relative to our peer group.

Type With Jackie and I off on PTO [paid time off] this week, I thought it would be timely to post some thoughts on the vacation time allotted to the average American worker.

According to this article from CNN, the average number of annual vacation days for the American worker is a little more than twelve. That translates to one day a month, which is “less than that of the average medieval peasant.” Even worse – a hefty number of Americans either don’t take all their allotted vacation time or admit to working while they are on vacation.