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UK external graduates blog

"You can't manage time, it just is"

“You can't manage time, it just is. So "time management" is a mislabeled problem, which has little chance of being an effective approach. What you really manage is your activity during time, and defining outcomes and physical actions required is the core process required to manage what you do.” David Allen, Productivity Consultant and author of; “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity” and “Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life”

Following on from my last entry on the topic of time management I have reached a new level of curiosity in how to manage my time, though as David notes above, I am not actually managing my time but the activities I choose to complete in that time.
I have recently started a new role in the Accelerated Solutions Environment, or ASE for short. This is at the heart of Capgemini’s brand and truly embodies our strap line of ‘Together Free your Energies’. The ASE is about brining together the right people, at the right time, and in the right environment in order to help the client achieve their goal. This could be in the form of an issue they are having problems solving, future planning for their business or reducing the time a given process takes. An ASE can be used in many situations and no 2 ASE’s are ever the same.
Working as part of the ‘Krew’ (the K stands for ‘knowledge’) who support events held in this environment is varied, busy and very enjoyable. It also often involves working quite long hours either during events or in preparation for them, with little time to stop and chew the cud. This makes managing your time and commitments a step harder as being unavailable for a whole day has many implications when you need to attend calls for other areas you may be supporting.
To survive in this business you need to be on the ball to pre-empt these situations and ensure the right people know your constraints and also to be able to free up suitable time for the highest priority activities. This is not an easy task and it is not a skill you can learn overnight! It is an art form and the most important part of it is being able to effectively prioritise. Making sure you tackle the most important things in a day. One useful tool for doing this is MoSCoW, this is a prioritisation and planning tool, list your tasks into the following order: Must, Should, Could, Want, then execute in that order. This will help you to complete the most important actions you have to achieve in a day.
But becoming a master time lord is not easy and it can take work. I think it is always important to reach out to those around you who can advise you how best to use your time, but you cannot always expect to get it right – sometimes you may need to work a little longer or strike from your tasks something that is just not going to be achieved. Always be realistic and you will sleep better at night knowing that you did everything you needed to before the end of your working day.

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Annabel Archer on August 12, 2008 | Comments (0)

Life on the Road

One question I’ve often been asked at recruitment fairs by interested students, is ‘what is it actually like working as a consultant?’ Well, one reality is that during your time in the CDC you will more than likely have to spend time working away from home. Paris in springtime? Occasionally. Zurich over the summer? Possibly. Scunthorpe over the winter? Probably.

So how much time can you expect to spend away? Well to put it into perspective, in my first year in the CDC I spent 7 months working away on two different projects. In comparison however, colleagues I started with have after 18 months yet to leave London!

So what is it like to work away during the week? Well the good news is that it really isn’t an Alan Partridge style existence of Travel Taverns and loner meals for one with an extra large plate. At Capgemini we aim to stick to the ‘3-4-5’ rule when working away. This is where you work for the client for 5 days, 4 days of which will be at their site wherever that may be, with the other day spent working from your base office. As a result you will be away for 3 nights (Monday-Wednesday), thus travelling Monday morning and returning Thursday night.

As you’d expect, being away midweek for extended periods of time can present some challenges, especially if you are in a relationship or living with someone (although I suppose 4 days apart might come as a welcome relief to some couples). The reality of working away can mean very early starts on a Monday morning followed by several hours on a train, and being away midweek can certainly curtail your social life. But don’t let me put you off, it does of course have many benefits. A decent meal out every night, a free gym on hand in the hotel, and if you’re not the tidiest person in the world (like myself) a freshly made bed and spotless room are things you quickly get used to. And I haven’t even mentioned hotel loyalty points yet! Stick with one company, play the game and sign up for their offers and you’ll soon be enjoying the highlife, be it free business class flights across the Atlantic or a complimentary weekend stay at a one star hotel in Croydon.

But for me, the best part about being away is definitely the camaraderie and friendships that you develop with your colleagues, be they fellow members of the CDC or the project team in general. It would be true to say that the best friends I’ve made during my time here have been with people that I’ve worked away with.

And a final benefit of life on the road? Well, speaking to a colleague before I wrote this blog, I asked him what the best bit was about working away, ‘easy’, he replied, ‘I’ve now got enough complimentary toiletry samples to last me for the next few years’.

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by James Curran on July 29, 2008 | Comments (0)

Tight for Time?

When you’re young running out of time always feels like such an adult occupation. Parents with cries of ‘I wish I had time for….’. did they not have effective time management skills? Were they taking on too much? What was so difficult about what they were doing? And then as I grew older, through school, through a gap year, through university I started to realise and understand their comments. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time to achieve all I want to achieve, I am aware that I have a slightly overambitious list and that climbing Everest is more of a whim than a reality, but it is these ambitions and lists that fill my time and my constant desire to develop my skills and knowledge and experience of the world.
I wasn’t expecting it but Capgemini has helped me on this front, by this I don’t mean that they have agreed to give me 2 months off so that I can go base camp and wait for the right moment to scale the enormous peak, though I dare say this is highly conceivable. What Capgemini has done and is doing is teaching me how to manage my time to get both what you need, and also the best, out of the time you have available to complete any given task. Working on client site 5 days a week and also needing to balance internal work alongside that which you pick up because it is of particular interest is an intricate task. It teaches you the importance of learning how to effectively manage your time and your commitments. In a career like management consulting this so important because the demands on your time can often be multiple and you may even be working away from where you live during the week. Being able to easily manage your work life will also translate to your personal life. However it is not as easy as it sounds, there will always be tasks that take up more of your time than you anticipated. When this happens you need to be able to effectively re-distribute your energies to ensure you maintain everything you need!!
Time – how to make sure there is enough for everything you want to do!

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Annabel Archer on July 23, 2008 | Comments (0)

Who do you think you are?

Hello and welcome…my name is Claire and I joined the CDC in September 2007. Since joining the programme, the most frequent question I get from friends and family as a CDCer is something along the lines of “Sorry Claire, but what exactly is a management consultant”? After I give them my well-prepared and heavily-recycled response, the next question is almost always something along the lines of “Why on earth would senior managers in large corporations listen to someone your age give them management advice”? (By the way, that’s a direct quote from my grandmother).

My answer is usually a two-parter.

First of all, the Capgemini way of working is all about collaboration. Whilst on client site, you will be part of a team of experienced professionals who understand that whilst you can bring the energy, enthusiasm and creativity that a team can sometimes lack, you are in the midst of a steep learning curve. Consultants within Capgemini have a great respect for the CDC and will make the utmost effort to ensure that you learn as much as possible on a project, without being unduly exposed. On every project I’ve been on so far, I’ve also felt a sense of trust in the team and have never been afraid to say “I don’t know” – a phrase that is never met with negative reaction in the CDC.

Secondly, the CDC is a development programme which lasts 2 years, during which you are entitled to 20 days training. This training takes place in the form of the CDC Academy; a fast-track, core training programme that has been developed to ensure that CDCers reach the required competency level to progress to Consultant grade. The Academy teaches you a variety of skills which help you to feel confident on client site, from workshop facilitation to listening skills to how you can influence your client. Armed with such knowledge, CDCers are fully prepared to add real value to our clients.

OK so I don’t usually give that exact answer (especially to my grandmother, who likes to cut to the chase) but because of the spirit of collaboration at Capgemini and the fantastic training provided in the CDC, I feel confident to respond that I’m well prepared.

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Claire Hempenstall on July 4, 2008 in Life as a consultant | Comments (0)

Welcome to the jungle...

Vitals: Nicholas Ashford, 23, Joined in March ‘08

About three weeks into the CDC you are allocated into streams – areas of
the internal work that CDCers do in addition to their external client work. I
was allocated into the Knowledge Management stream and each stream is made of
specific focus areas…

One day later and I was offered the opportunity to lead one of the focus
areas: Knowledge Implementation (KI). Deal! I know it's cliché, but the opportunities really are there for the
taking if you want them.

That was the easy part, now I had to start to deliver. Having just
started at Capgemini, just started on the CDC, just
started on my project and just starting my first internal role you could be
forgiven for thinking that taking on the focus area lead was biting off a
little more than I could chew – it almost was.

But that is the thing about Capgemini and the CDC in particular, it that
there’s no shame in asking for support and people are more happy to give it. So
after a conversations with my Stream Lead, the previous focus area lead and
other who had been in KI and taking onboard some advice, I figured out where I
wanted to go and off I went.

So what is Knowledge Implementation and what are we doing? Well
essentially, it’s about sharing Capgemini’s knowledge and expertise with charitable
partner organisations (the current incumbent is AIESEC. Currently we are working on three deliverables:

• - Creating a workshop on collaboration for AIESEC to present to students


• - Doing some consultancy work with AIESEC to ensure their organisation’s knowledge is retained as people pass through and move on


• - Searching and selecting an additional charitable organisation for Capgemini to create a long-term partnership with

It’s an excellent opportunity to really give something back to the
community and also to have a free hand over how you want to meet those
objectives and it what timeline you think you can do it in. As a taster, I’m
currently mulling over whether to continue with the potentially infinite
research on potential partners so I don’t miss a gem that is hiding, or whether
to conclude the research and really move things forward. So how do I know when
we have done enough research, and how can I prove it? A good little challenge!

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by Nicholas Ashford on June 17, 2008 in Life as a consultant | Comments (0)

Hello from Events!

So here we go… My name is James Copeman and I have been in the CDC since September 2006. It’s my job to give you a bit of an insight into how the CDC works alongside our internal work.

I am in the Events Stream at the moment (we change our work streams every four months or so). We are responsible for organising the events for the whole CDC, from the monthly conference calls with the management team, to regular Friday night drinks after work and the quarterly CDC meeting, a gathering of every CDCer into a carefully selected venue for some hard work, fun and frolics!

I’m working in the monthly events part of the stream at the moment, so alongside my client work over in sunny (or not so sunny) Victoria, I am also organising the regular “Dial Deborah” calls that allow us to ask Deborah (CDC Manager) questions about how things are going and what the future holds for the community. On top of that I’m giving some technical advice to the rest of the stream about Microsoft Access and how we can use it to create a database of the venues that we use to hold our events, and creating a pack to kick off a CDC Squash League!

There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye though. We have to treat internal work just like we treat project work. This means that we have to manage our stakeholders, keeping our clients happy and informed of what we are doing. It also means that we have to constantly understand the needs of the customer – in this case the CDC community. There is no point in developing something that will never be used – so we have to use our informal networks of friends and colleagues to judge the demand for things we do. It all makes things that much more complicated, but its great experience for when we are working on client site – nothing is ever as simple as it seems there!

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by James Copeman on June 16, 2008 in Life as a consultant | Comments (0)

Getting through the process....

Welcome all to my first posting on the CDC Blog.

For those of you currently going through the application process for either 2008 or 2009, I feel your pain, as I was in your shoes exactly 2 years ago. Oh the fun I had with the application form, and of trying to squeeze answers down into 50 words or less. Just what you fancy doing after coming back from work. The fact that I was working at the time meant that the whole process was trickier than it otherwise would have been. You face the conundrum of do you tell your boss and colleagues that you’re looking for a new job? If you don’t tell them, then there is the question of how you get time off for the interviews. My boss quickly became suspicious when I started trying to take holidays on random days of the week!

Having cleared the application form I was through to a decidedly short first interview of around 30 minutes. Lots to ponder on the three hour journey home, as I concluded that it must have gone exceedingly well or really badly.
A month or so later I was back in Soho for the assessment centre. Having a quick read through of my notes on a park bench before the event, I somehow managed to get chewing gum stuck all down my trousers. Great, just the professional sort of look I was trying to achieve! Chewing gum aside, it was a fun day, and after waiting in anticipation over the weekend, my grin was even cheesier than normal when Capgemini rang to offer me the job on the Monday.

So for those of you who are struggling to cram just 50 words into the boxes on the application form, do stick with it. The hard work will definitely be worth it in the end, I can testify to that. Just watch out for the chewing gum on the benches at the park down the street.

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by James Curran on June 4, 2008 | Comments (0)

We have lift off!!!

As I am sat on the morning commute from London to Sheffield, it feels like quite an appropriate place to start this journey - welcome to the CDC Blog!!!

Over the coming weeks, months, years (!?!) … we will be writing the CDC Blog to help share our experiences with you to provide a firsthand insight to life at Capgemini, the challenge of recruitment and working in the CDC, UK and abroad.

One of the main themes of our blog will be to talk about all of the extra-curricular activities that life in the CDC can provide you with. A team of 8 CDCers will share their experiences of stream work … what’s that I hear you cry? CDC stream work provides a special place to learn the ropes of being a consultant. After 15 months on the grad scheme, I have been resourced onto some very high profile projects that provide challenges of learning content quickly, dealing with demanding clients and adapting messages in both the private and public sector, but it is in stream work where I have been exposed to some of the most interesting challenges. The CDC streams are designed to allow CDCers to run teams and projects, create existing deliverables, shape the look and feel of the CDC and overall learn and develop to become a great consultant, outside of the client project.

We will also be providing you with a detailed insight into the journey of two CDCers, which coincidentally have gone from studying in the UK to working in China before coming back to London to join the rat race.

Anyway, as I am sat here writing this whilst also pondering on how to raise sponsorship for the Capgemini charity event I am competing in later in June and trying to prioritise our current project risks and issues before a workshop this morning, the joyful sight of Sheffield approaches on the horizon. Until next time …

Digg this | Seed Newsvine | Permanent link | Posted by James Gregory on June 3, 2008 in Life as a consultant | Comments (0)