March 2013
Hi everyone,
It's springtime in the Bay area and I'm loving it! More sunshine, longer days...good stuff. And exciting times for my client. Our first wave in optimizing indirect spend categories is almost complete and I have to say that we had some great outcomes from our negotiations.
It's also exciting for me that I staffed my new team for wave two of this engagement. Staffing a project at McKinsey is pretty fascinating. Projects need the right consultants to join—consultants with the right skill sets and the right personalities to best serve our clients. Similarly, consultants need the right project—the project that will give them the best learning and development opportunity from a personal, functional and industry perspective, as well as the right opportunity to grow in their skill set, from first year business analyst to associate to engagement manager.
A fair amount of work goes into staffing consultants onto client engagements. Luckily, our professional development managers do a great job of coordinating the process. They check with consultants and past team members on their needs, and then they check with the new engagement managers on what's needed for the upcoming project. As the engagement manager, I look through long lists of consultant profiles, make many, many phone calls and send a lot of e-mails. And then, after a lot of back and forth—almost magically—one after another team member gets confirmed and the team falls into place. Then, finally, the real fun begins! We had a great team kick-off yesterday and a nice team dinner later (but the details of that might have to wait until one of my next updates!).
—Britta