What I Learnt as a Consultant?

28 June 2022

During the internship programs, I worked on business cases, conducting extensive research and studies on marketing and financial analysis, which I later found that this is just a typical way consulting firms teach the junior consultants the fundamentals of business sense and logical thinking.

However, I've never ever thought about a further crucial task or competency that consultants perform on a daily basis. That is project management.

Learning Programming as a Management Consultant?

From the second month I joined Skylight, all new hires were put on a 2-month training program, which was called IT project training. During this training program, we started to learn programming from scratch by ourselves and at the end we needed to deliver a couple of IT projects.

The purpose of this training program was to equip new hires with project management skills and basic understanding of IT, which the company believed would help us communicate better with clients and partners.

The training I joined had Machine Learning as its theme. This was the first time I learnt Python. I discovered that machine learning was not difficult to start learning after creating my own NLP (Nathural Language Processing) programs.

I valued this learning experience, which eventually inspired me to be a product manager. However, at the point of time, I didn't know how it would help me to work as a management consultant.

From Business Analyst to "Project Manager"

The first project I joined, and most of my batchmates joined, were IT-related projects. As OJT members, we usually assisted the project manager to create basic documentation, such as MOM. With the understanding of the projects gets deepened, we will gradually take on discussion deck preparation, reporting slides creation and business requirement documentation, etc.

I was firstly assigned to a company internal project to rebuild an HR software system using the waterfall methodology. I skipped the MOM-writing phase and focused on documenting the business and technical requirements. Interestingly, I even used HTML and CSS to help with the front-end design for this internal project. This reinforced my interest in software development projects.

After the business requirement documentation was completed, I was successfully assign to a client-facing project. From then, I worked as a PMO team member and then project manager in the project teams on several PMO projects involving various project types and industries, but basically those that were IT-related.

I've gained some insights into software development life cycles by working with both Waterfall and Agile approaches, learning from those successes as well as failures of the projects.

To be continued...