Death Valley

I have been through 8 weeks out of my 10-week internship. Although I had a very easy and smooth start, it is getting crazily busy as my internship approaches its end.

As I mentioned in earlier post, I have not been assigned to a real client project for the summer, but instead, I have worked on two Bid and Proposal projects. While the first one lasted only a week which is norm for B&P effort, the second one that I am working on has been going on for more than a month and there is almost another month schedule ahead of it.

To give you a sense of what I have been up to, I just sent out version 55 of the project deck to my boss. So, basically I have been intimate friends with PPT and Excel. Unlike normal projects, I have to deliver some new slides or spreadsheet models on a daily basis. I spent 10 to 16 hours every day in office, worked more hours after coming back home, and sometimes need to get up 4am to catch the 6am flight to New York, and flew back to Chicago the next evening. So, are you still thinking about consulting??
However, on the bright side, due to the importance of this proposal, I have been given great exposure to high level leadership team during the project. I spent 6 hours this Wednesday with IBM Global XX industry Leader, North America YY practice leader, and other VPs and executives in a tiny meeting room in IBM New York office. Can you believe it?

Although tired, I have been learning and improving a lot during the past weeks! Not only excel and PPT skills, but also the way I think and work. I leant to pay attention to details such as font size of a text box, meanwhile I think strategically from higher level and different perspectives. I become more comfortable with uncertainties and vagueness and am able to make educated assumptions wherever necessary. I realized that we are actually employed and paid to solve those uncertainties which clients found difficult to solve themselves. I am happy with my progress!!

Exploring Chicago!!

Most of you must think that consultants travel all the time, however, this is just not the case for me. Unlike my other IBM GBS fellow interns who have been traveling to clients, I have been assigned to work on two bid and proposal projects, both of which unfortunately don’t require traveling. So, basically, I have spent most of my internship working in IBM Chicago downtown office in the Loop and right across Deloitte building. Actually, out of 18 interns of GBS this year, I am the only one working in IBM office and don’t travel. Although not ideal and different from what I have expected, it allowed me to explore Chicago a little bit more and deeper. It is truly an amazing city in terms of whatever you name it, although a little windy sometimes, but just sometimes, not always. As I have been to almost all the major big cities in US, I can say that Chicago is second to none.

Since I live in the Chicago suburbs, I commute between work and home by Amtrak train, and one way trip takes around 45 minutes if I catch an express train, otherwise it will be 1.5 hours. If you have seen the new movie ‘Source Code’, you should know how the Amtrak train in Chicago looks like. It is comfortable and safe, although not too new. Actually, it is pretty convenient for those who live in suburbs and work in downtown Chicago. You know, the traffic in Chicago during rush hours can be really bad and parking fees is just crazy.

During the past one and half months, I have been to lots of wonderful parks, museums, restaurants, and bars in Chicago. However, nothing is comparable to the experience on the national day weekend. I went boating on Michigan Lake with a few friends! It was really a unique and hilarious experience for me. Prior to that, I had never been on a private boat before. It was just great to look at the skyscrapers of Chicago from another angel and enjoy the sun shine a little bit after spending most of my time in office since my internship starts. Unfortunately I had been made fun of having the so called farm’s tan after whole day exposure to sun; I should have taken my t-shirt off!! Need to work out a little bit though!!

Transformation from Engineer to Consultant

After more than 5 weeks in IBM GBS, I have experienced and learned a lot in consulting and am getting used to my job role as a business consultant, which is no longer that mysterious to me as it was before since my previous background was a software engineer and I had zero experience in consulting or even client-facing job roles. To my satisfaction, I like my new role, since I had more mental challenges than before, and accordingly more impact with what I do.

As an engineer, all I was supposed to do is to implement the ‘Requirement’ written by Product Managers within ‘scheduled project deadline’ decided by Project Managers. I don’t need to be really creative or innovative to get my job done; it was actually straightforward and ‘easy’ if you master the technical side. However, as a consultant, I need to manage myself and be relatively independent on what I do. And my work becomes more diversified than before. Firstly, I need to collect business requirements from both team members and clients. Then, I need to come up with some proposal documents describing what the hypotheses and deliverables will be. Lastly, I have to come up with a work plan document regarding those deliverables which could be either strategy or implementation in nature. Although I mentioned the need to be independent as a consultant, don’t get me wrong, we can actually never achieve anything without effective team work no matter how senior or knowledgeable one becomes.

The other important learning from the past 5 weeks is that a good consultant needs to be comfortable and efficient in working with uncertainties and make educated assumptions or guesses whenever necessary. Nevertheless, because of my engineer background, I was really bad at working with uncertainties at first. I was afraid of making wrong or inappropriate assumptions if I don’t find ‘sound’ evidence to back them up, therefore, I turned out be slow and ineffective and felt lost of directions. Luckily, I got a wonderful project buddy who has always been patient in giving me instructions and transferring his experience to me since he was an engineer as well and had gone through what I am experiencing. Although I think I am getting better, Rome was not built in a day anyway.

First week in IBM GBS

The first one and half week of my internship has passed by quickly, and I have received my first paycheck this morning, which is my first one after I quitted my job in China one year ago!

I started my three-day orientation and training with other 40 interns, including both MBAs and undergraduates, in Herndon, Virginia, which is a nice city near Washington DC Dulles international airport. It is really nice to know all of the interns, and I talked with almost everyone and made quite a few new friends from different MBA programs and universities all over the U.S. Actually, what impressed me most is the diversity of the intern class; people are originally from all over the world with different academic and professional background. But one thing in common, all of us are passionate about consulting, especially information technology oriented strategy consulting. So our conversation topics are mostly around the unknown consultant life ahead of us in near future.

All of the interns were recruited by IBM Global Business Service and will be based in either New York or Chicago office during the summer. In IBM GBS commercial sector, consultants are aligned with different industrial sectors, including financial services, distribution, communications, industrial, general business and internal practice. Each of these sectors is an independent P/L, consisting of Strategy transformation, business analytics optimization and SAP and oracle application practice. As I mentioned in my previous post, I am aligned with strategy and transformation practice within Industrial Sector for the summer.

I spent most of time in the first week studying industrial sectors’ learning material, and more importantly, familiarizing myself with all kinds of administration tools within IBM. Although I had sort of expected the complexity of the administration system of IBM since it is such a huge company, I was still surprised after a glimpse of how this ‘elephant’ company is actually run. At the end of last week, I finally got to know my project assignment and I will probably travel to client site starting from the mid of next week. I will come back with new stories about my internship in 2 weeks. Good luck to everyone!

Happy Centennial Birthday, IBM!

My name is Jiawen Mou, an MBA student in Ross School of Business at Univ. of Michigan. After finishing my first year in Ross, in less than one week, I will start my internship at IBM GBS (Global Business Service) Strategy and Transformation Division, working as an MBA intern consultant. Although I don’t know my specific project assignment for the summer yet, I was informed that I would be staffed in Industrial group in Chicago. I am really excited about the opportunity to work for IBM, especially after knowing that IBM is going to be 100 years old this June 16th.
Prior to business school, I had been working as an engineer and project leader in eBay China Development Center, however, I had always been looking for new learning opportunities outside engineering, and that’s why I came to US to pursue my MBA degree. As for the internship in IBM consulting division, I am expecting to experience the life as a consultant and challenge myself to learn new things and think differently.
While being excited about my new job function, I feel more pressure and nervous as the start date approaches. Actually, my biggest worry is still my English abilities. What if I can’t fluently express myself in a conference call!? What if I stumble in a presentation to clients!? Challenging but intriguing!