Well, I said I would talk about the projects which, for my working day, is the raison d’etre!

When you join, there’s much talk about the importance of your first project, and this is so true. Not so much in terms of what you are doing, but more for the opportunities of first building your internal networks, and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. I was a bit worried, as my first project seemed just not to be happening, and the first few leads just melted away (the joys of starting in the middle of the peak holiday season), but I finally got to hear of a project towards the end of one week, and started the next!

I was basically asked to take over some pandemic planning coordination within a petrochemicals company; the project had already commenced, but the Project Manager had realised that some pandemic planning experience was required to be able to add full value for the Client.

Pandemic planning can be seen as an off-shoot of business continuity planning. It is basically the development of a scenario-specific plan for pandemic events, based on the recent alerts around H5N1, and involves ensuring that a business is well placed to cope with staff unavailability (both by enabling processes like working from home, and also for planning what to do if large proportions of the workforce are simply not able to work).

The pandemic planning templates had already been completed by the Client, and I was involved with rolling this out to the refineries; assisting them in understanding what was required, and ensuring that the plans were completed within the Client-specified time-table, and that the plans met certain standards. Planning for refineries is quite a challenge; it is not a straight-forward office-based process that can be done from home! Plus the fact there were the challenges of working with a global network, complete with language barriers and time differences….a couple of 2am phone calls were required!!!

The project work did finish according to plan, and a good indication that the Client was happy with the work was the fact that we were asked to go out to Germany to assist in their pandemic planning…..but more about that project later!

Throughout the project, life with Accenture went on – assisting at an evening for Women in Technology, talking about my experiences as an newbie experienced hire, attending a Security dinner, hosting some key clients, assisting with the development of Methods and various presentations.

Anyway, enough rambling! Back soon to talk about some other projects!