A well-rounded work plan

HI Everyone, it has been a while since my last post. And time has gone pretty fast for my internship; I cannot believe I am halfway already. This is my 5 week out of 10. Currently, after having several discussions with my manager and teammates, I came up with a defined work plan. It was not surprising for me that some thing will be ambiguous, and that I would have to step up and starts my own work plan. By saying this I don’t mean that they didn’t know what I have to do, but I am saying that they were not 100% sure about what would my contribution look like. Which doesn’t surprise me, as in my previous work at P&G things were like this, but I can say that it is a much better way to learn things and develop different skills. It is like a consultant job, without the same pay but certainly without the same working hours. Well, to make the story short, I realized that I could match my personal objectives in terms of skills/experiences to gain, and what Citi needed. So I came with 3 different projects a) Develop a competitive analysis of different potential suppliers b) Develop the template/framework of the steps to follow in order to close a deal of a new business model, with the top retailers of US c) Asses the social media landscape and come up with a strategy that differentiates Citi (and its new business model) from other companies. It took me several meetings and talking with different people to gain sponsors for my projects. Citi, as any other big organization, works a lot with this corporate dynamic of aligning different stakeholders. However I am very satisfied with the outcome, as I will build experience in strategy, business development and social media. Now, in order to get things done, I built a timeline, develop and aligned different frameworks to approach each of the projects, and committed my deliverables, in a very specific way. For example, in the social media I will deliver an executive summary in a word document, and a deck with all the insights, next steps and success criteria. This may sound logic, but when it comes to people, everyone is different. I learned in my previous job that it is better to over communicate and set the right expectations, using measurable criteria. (Similar to the START concept we revised at MO 503). It happened some times before that if these things are not stated, there may be some miscommunications. The other thing is that in big companies, that work as matrix organizations, you never know when a person working close to you moves to a different role or simply leaves the company, so it is very important to have a clear work plan.

That’s it for know, but I’ll keep you posted.