McKinsey Women Blog

Working on a KIP for the Operations practice

Wow, it has been a while – so much to catch up on! For this post I wanted to share a cool non-client project I worked on.
Denise
 Denise

Originally from Australia, Denise joined our Stamford office in the fall of 2014 as an experienced hire, and transferred to the Seattle office in the fall of 2016. She's served a wide range of clients in her consulting career and is now focused on food companies in the consumer, retail, and logistics industries. Denise holds degrees in commerce and economics from the University of Queensland. She has lots of personal interests, including cooking, restaurant-exploring, anything outdoors, playing the saxophone, keeping up with the latest on entrepreneurship and gender issues, and exploring her new home country with family and friends.

Knowledge
Flexibility

Hi everyone –

Wow, it has been a while – so much to catch up on! For this post I wanted to share a cool non-client project I worked on. My journey at McKinsey has not been just client work—I’ve been able to do a mix of things so that I’m helping clients, helping the firm, and also developing myself. I’d spent a large chunk of the year focused on client work, taken time off in the summer and done a lot of training to focus on myself, so I was excited to spend the last quarter of the year on a KIP for the Operations Practice.

KIP is short for Knowledge Investment Program, and being staffed on a KIP is similar to that of a client engagement project. McKinsey launched its KIP program in 2004 and has since published thousands of knowledge pieces. The KIP program provides a structured way for McKinsey colleagues to share knowledge with each other and is a very valuable aspect of the firm.

The KIP I worked on was focused on cost engineering and understanding what our future in this area looks like. While cost engineering is prevalent in some industries (like advanced industries), we found that the maturity of cost engineering differs significantly across sectors. We’re taking the work from the KIP to build something that will help all sectors understand their maturity and the way they think about achieving excellence in cost engineering. I’m excited about this because it is bringing together different parts of the firm and utilizing so much knowledge and so many different skills our colleagues have. Despite the difficulties of aligning meeting times for our KIP’s global team KIP (Germany, London, Cleveland, Denver, Seattle!), it was so great to remain local for this!

I’ll share a look into my latest client engagement in my next post.

Denise