Looking back over my last few blog posts, I notice that I have discussed topics such as travel, performance reviews, people management and office life here at Accenture. However, it has been some time since I last talked about what I actually do here on my current project! My role has changed quite substantially since I last wrote about it, reflecting the length of time that I have served on my current project, and my increasing level of experience. Hopefully this blog entry will give you an idea of the type of roles and responsibilities that you may expect when (as in my case) you have been with Accenture between one and two years.

I am still working on the same project, a large for a multinational high-tech company. The deal involves our client outsourcing their finance and accounting processes in all of their local country subsidiaries to Accenture, where we will then provide these services back to the client from our outsourcing Delivery Centres in Buenos Aires, Chennai, Dalian and Warsaw. The deal involves hiring nearly 500 people across the four Delivery Centres, providing finance, accounting and procurement services to the client’s regional offices in more than 90 countries.

As a Mobilisation team member, I work on the project’s Transition Team – the team responsible for the successful transfer of the business processes from the client to Accenture. Mobilisation people specialise in getting outsourcing deals up and running, transferring the business processes from the client to Accenture and ensuring that they are stable, before handing over responsibility for the ongoing management of the outsourced service to Accenture’s Operations team. Mobilisation’s involvement in an outsourcing engagement is quite short (a Mobilisation may take anything from three to 18 or more months, depending on the complexity of the processes being outsourced and the number of separate “waves” into which the transition is broken down) in relation to the total lifetime of the deal, which may often run for an initial period of seven or more years, with contract extensions being signed to extend the arrangement for longer. However, coming at the beginning of the engagement, the Mobilisation phase is critical to establishing stable operations, ensuring that the project comes in on budget and that Accenture is able to meet the service level agreements (SLAs) agreed with the client.

At the present time, I have three main tasks as a member of the Transition Team:

1. Project Management Office duties
2. Remote Knowledge Transfer Lead
3. Any other random assignments that the Transition Management Team choose to send my way!

Project Management Office

This was the role which I was assigned when I first joined my current project back in March 2007. Paradoxically though, my responsibilities in this area have increased, while the proportion of my time spent working on PMO activities has shrunk to about 30 percent of my working week.

The rhythm of my PMO work revolves around the PMO Call, which takes place every Monday. This is the main call between the client and Accenture transition management teams, where we present the latest status of the transition, and discuss any issues or concerns that may have arisen. In preparation for the PMO Call, I produce the PMO Report, which summarises the progress made in the transition each week. I also produce the recruitment report, summarising our progress in hiring people into our Delivery Centres to perform the business processes for the client. I facilitate the PMO Call, ensuring that we stick to the agenda and the one-hour time slot for the meeting. Sometimes I am asked to present the status update for one of our managers when they are not able to attend the call for some reason. As most of the people on the call are senior managers from Accenture or senior project leadership within the client, this can be quite daunting! However, I have established a good rapport with the client leadership team, and my work in the PMO gives me a good view of everything that is happening in the wider project.

Remote Knowledge Transfer Lead

As I explained in an earlier post (New Year, Partially New Role – January 14, 2008), before we take over the client’s business processes and execute them from our Delivery Centres (DCs), it is necessary to transfer the knowledge of those processes from the client’s staff to our Operations team members in the DCs. In the case of the client’s larger country subsidiaries, this knowledge transfer (KT) would take place on site – i.e. we would send one or more Accenture operations people (the same people who would be responsible for executing the processes back in the DC) to the client’s local country subsidiary in order to learn the process from the client employees who currently do the job.

Coming to the end of the project, we are beginning to transition work from the client’s smaller subsidiaries – some of these countries have one full-time employee or less performing their finance and accounting work. In these cases, it can be cost prohibitive to send an Accenture operations person to another person for up to seven weeks, incurring all of the associated air fare and hotel expenses. Therefore, we adopt a “Remote Knowledge Transfer” approach for these smaller subsidiaries, using tools such as conference calls, web conferences and a team website to transfer the required business process knowledge from the client to our Operations team without the need to physically visit the client site.

When I last spoke about my role in January, I had become the Remote KT Tools Lead, responsible for training all KT participants (both client and Accenture) in the use of the tools, and troubleshooting any issues. Recently, my role has expanded, and I am now the Remote KT Lead for my project, with overall responsibility for the knowledge transfer in all of these small subsidiaries that we do not plan to physically visit. This involves explaining the Remote KT approach to the subsidiary financial leadership team, training the client employees (mentors) and Accenture DC personnel (knowledge recipients) in the use of the Remote KT tools, planning the schedule of KT activities and managing against the plan to ensure that Remote KT takes place and finishes on schedule.

These are some of the things that I have done this week as Remote KT Lead:

• Attended a Remote Knowledge Transfer session between our Warsaw Delivery Centre and our client’s subsidiary in French-speaking Africa to ensure that the schedule was maintained. After I had set out the agenda at the beginning of the call, the participants switched to speaking French as this is their native language. Thankfully I do not need to understand the client’s accounting processes, as my French is best described as “weak,” and certainly not up to the task!

• Scheduled five Remote KT sessions for a client subsidiary in the Middle East. This particular subsidiary is actually supposed to receive on-site knowledge transfer, but delays in securing a visa for our Accenture operations team member in Chennai means that we have had to start out with remote KT.

• Provided Remote KT Tools training to a Chennai-based team member who will be supporting the client’s Egypt subsidiary.

• Attended management status calls for three separate subsidiary transitions, providing a status update on the progress of remote KT and answering questions from the client financial controllers and directors.

Random Assignments

I was actually handed a large and rather interesting "random assignment" to complete this week, which ended up consuming quite a lot of my time. However, this blog post is long enough already, so I will save this particular story for next week!