I joined Simatree in September 2022 after two years working as a best practice researcher. Immediately, I joined a five-person project team serving a large non-profit client in financial services. After quickly learning as much as I could about the organization and the work to be completed for them, I took on key pieces of several deliverables. It was exciting to transition to an environment where I could get my hands dirty and gain in-depth experience in areas such as organizational structure, technology strategy, internal processes, capability maturity, vendor management, and budgeting.
When I joined, I had limited familiarity with the workings of a large IT organization. But I leveraged my skillset from past experiences conducting stakeholder interviews, document review, data analysis, and secondary research and tapped into the deep research expertise within my project team and Simatree at large. This allowed me to quickly learn the intricacies of the client’s IT organization and the broader organization’s culture, people, processes, and technology. Due to the skills and leadership of our project manager, the team was able to quickly produce and iterate on deliverables. Together we leveraged our knowledge of organizational structure, process optimization, and technology and data strategy and coupled it with the client’s intimate knowledge of their organization to produce actionable recommendations and a better path forward.
The team gave me autonomy to work on key sections of deliverables, including work on internal process improvements, organizational structure and resource allocation changes, vendor management best practices, and a reimagined budgeting process. On the budget front, I familiarized myself with the Technology Business Management (TBM) framework and drafted a Proof of Concept of the client’s current budget with a refreshed look aligned to TBM. This involved taking the client’s 2023 budget spreadsheet, mapping all 2023 projects and line items to the TBM framework, and producing new granular and high-level budget views through a series of Excel tables. This illustrates that you can use simple, common tools, such as Excel, to reach a powerful solution.
This project was my greatest professional challenge to date. Each day was action-packed, and the nature of the work forced me to quickly learn a great deal about a broad range of business and technical concepts. In addition to the topics mentioned, I learned a ton about change management and the importance of culture, leadership, and developing a solid strategy – be it technological or otherwise.
There was a strong sense of purpose in the work we were doing and satisfaction in hearing from the client that we delivered many things of value. There was thought work, technical work, quantitative work, qualitative work, content production, and design. Nothing was completed in isolation, with a strong emphasis on collaboration to drive alignment of our deliverables and recommendations. The support from peers meant a lot for me as a more junior consultant with a nascent understanding of several of the terrains covered.
Most importantly, and despite the demanding nature of the project work, I experienced a great work-life balance throughout the project. I had the ability to take needed time off for vacation and enjoyed the many cultural perks of working at Simatree. Plus, I met a great and growing group of colleagues. What really strikes me as unique is how real the conversations were internally and with the client. We didn’t speak in platitudes, we didn’t take ourselves too seriously, we didn’t shy away from difficult conversations, and we didn’t hold back simply to please. Instead, we made what we determined to be the best recommendations based on evidence and experience. And we even had some fun with it.
