The great thing about a company like Accenture is the chance to work within different projects – like new jobs but without the ultra scary interview, sometimes! Then when you’re within a team like the Development Control Services Center (DCSC), you work across multiple projects on a daily basis. Our project count has gone up from two in January to four external and two internal projects all supported by one central team, code repository and incident tracking system. This can be quite taxing as along side the general day to day support we are carrying out testing on new products for integrating with our tools, upgrades to existing applications as we like to stay ahead of the times and development to our internal tools. But then that’s what makes our work so interesting. We may be a support team but on top of that we are always pushing to enhance our processes and make it so daily support work isn’t a chore, more a click of a button on a new tool. If you have to do it more than once; automate it – and so we do.

It is summer and we are about to lose our placement students as they return to University to complete their degrees. At the same time we have the typical summer holiday scramble and two new projects to support creeping up on us. Therefore we are on a mass push for handover meetings, Wiki’ing all information people have stored in their brains and of course organising leaving parties and welcome packs for new colleagues joining us. Alongside this we have to do our day to day support and development so never a dull day and as busy as ever over what is supposedly the quiet period for work. It's been an exciting time recently with our Norwegian colleague coming over for some cross training and two members of the UK team being sent to Milan to setup a new project for us to support from the UK. Wonder where we’ll be travelling to next!

As it has been a while between updates I will give you a brief breakdown of events over the last couple of months:

Go Live number 2 for the Norwegian Project:
3 new colleagues joined the Development Control Services Centre (DCSC) team for Cross Training
(1 of which went straight onto the Brussels project)
Skiing holiday for me DCSC Team Meal
UKDC Annual Conference
3 DCSC team members rolled onto new Projects
Easter holiday for everyone
Desk assessment for me
Holiday to move house for me
2 New DCSC team members (1 straight off to a new role)

So with all the team changes, the benefits and downfalls of a service group I guess, along with the holidays and go lives, it has been a little hectic within my neck of the woods, and that’s just the desk allocation! This is a good part of our area though really. We provide a large service team for multiple projects so people come and go quickly and those of us in the core DCSC team work across different areas so you can’t really get bored. Currently we are making a big push to be able to roll out our processes in record time to new projects which is the main reason for the large flow of people; we have a lot to do basically and grabbing who we can to help!

Couple of work highlights would be the DCSC team meal and UK Deliver Centre (UKDC) conference. It’s always good to socialise with colleagues to build your network and your team’s rapport so we finally managed to get a meal organised. Then two days later we had our UKDC annual conference which includes an evening meal for all 1000+ people within the UKDC followed the next day by an all day conference.

The conference is a highlight in the Accenture calendar, bringing the Solutions and Consulting workforce that make up the UKDC together to hear from the Senior Executive team where we’re at in terms of the past year, and more importantly what’s in the pipeline. Service and skill groups have sections to share their newest tools and it’s good to hear what else is going on in the company. There are also breakout sessions where we get into teams and this year had to produce a billboard, t-shirt and radio advert for our service or skill group. The winner had to record their’s for the whole conference to see, luckily we weren’t that good!

Of course we can’t forget being involved in a Go Live for a project. Knowing you’ve been part of getting a system together, pushing it through the testing and getting it up and running for the users is a great feeling and the main reason I am in the Development Control Service team. We are there from the start of the project helping to define the development strategies, right until the end deploying the code to production which is pretty good.

Then on top of all these community events I managed to have my workstation assessment finally and the outcome is:
I get a lightweight backpack for my laptop
A new roller ball mouse, mainly good for upsetting users of my computer
New fully adjustable chair
Desk raised a whole inch

All in all an action filled couple of months. Hopefully the next few won’t be so busy so I can update you a bit sooner.

(Photo above - Norwegian team member with UK team member)

So here’s the travelling side you can experience through working for Solutions. My weekly commute included a flight to Oslo on Monday and back Thursday. My base while out of town was a hotel in the city where the reception staff recognised me enough to give me upgrades.

Often I would stay late at work and get a takeaway with others at the office, quite a nice selection I would recommend Spice.no. When I escaped early I would sample the many restaurants in Oslo armed with a book so I didn’t get bored eating alone. I didn’t always eat alone though, my Norwegian manager and some team mates would often go out together, I wasn’t abandoned!

So we’re onto my current project which involves working for a client based in Oslo, Norway which is pretty interesting. Almost a year ago I had an e-mail with flight details for the following week saying I was to get the 7am flight out of Heathrow to Oslo. This was for a three-day session to gather information about what would be required to install a Change Management system in the new project.

Tuesday came around and I caught a taxi at 5am to get to Heathrow. On arriving at Oslo airport I navigated the train system into the City and got a taxi to a building on a road I couldn’t pronounce. Once there I was greeted by my English manager and my team for the next year and beyond. Everyone was very friendly, took me to lunch and broke me into the Norwegian way of work.

Hello and welcome to my first Accenture Technology Solutions blog post. I will just give a quick intro to myself and my background with Accenture Technology Solutions for now and hopefully as the blog progresses you will be able to get a good understanding of what life is like inside the wheels of Accenture.

I joined Accenture Technology Solutions back in July 2003 as an Industrial Placement student as part of my Computing and IT course at Surrey University. The year was definitely worthwhile in terms of understanding the workplace and building a good framework of contacts for the future. I was lucky enough to be placed on an out of town assignment down the road from my family home so enjoyed the social life of the out of town project alongside my mum’s home cooking.