At CI Projects, we are passionate about education and empowerment and have supported a number of student placements and internships over the years. Our latest student intern is Ali Chaundry. Ali came from Pakistan to study Business Management at Brunel University London and recently enrolled onto a mentoring programme, where he was identified as a bright and hard working individual with a keen passion to become a consultant one day. When his mentor contacted us, we were excited to support his career aspirations and offered to provide him with work experience on one of our client projects at London Business School (LBS), where he spent a day with our Process Improvement team.
Here is Ali’s account of his work experience with us:
“On July 9, I took a chilly shower to start my day. I arrived at London Business School (LBS) at precisely nine o’clock for my first day working with CI Projects as an intern. CI Projects are currently supporting LBS with a transformation programme. There I first met their process improvement expert. He gave a brief introduction regarding the day’s events as well as the workshop’s goals and objectives when I arrived. Additionally, the first piece of advice he gave me was to see every obstacle or setback as an opportunity and that is what we did in the workshop, converted problems into opportunities for the organisation’s benefit.
Meeting the two LBS teams and identifying and cataloguing the steps that must be taken from planning the lecture to delivering it were the day’s goals and objectives in order to understand and recommend to LBS how they could save time, costs, improve quality, efficiency, and productivity. To start with, each process and sub processes were listed down on the board along with the pain points associated each step. The goal and propose of this was to identify, and if needed, eliminate unnecessary processes for better results. We repeated this practice of listing the processes and creating a map with both the teams from LBS.
By the end of the workshop, we had a clear picture of the process and problems associated with it. Our focus was to identify the pains and issues which are encountered by both the teams and utilise most of the college resources. A heat map was developed which proposed the key areas to focus on.
My understanding of the whole workshop suggests that many organisations are complex with a lot of processes involved and performed by different individuals from different teams; however there is a need to implement some structured and written practices and a unified approach need to be followed to perform tasks with set rules, because what was evident throughout the whole workshop was that there was no set instructions or rules or guide to perform any task – instead everyone has the process stored in their head which also results in ‘Knowledge Management’ issues. By cutting out some processes and having more coordination, organisations can further improve their operational processes and save a lot of time too.
Our day ended, with thanking both the teams and collecting hundreds of notes off from the board to evaluate the map again and digitally draw it for a better understanding and future recommendations.”
We’d like to say a special thank you to Jeremy Galea, Ali’s mentor, for making the connection with us and arranging the work experience opportunity, and to Barry Sanderson and Barbora Hallam-Skalova for supporting Ali and giving him exposure into the world of consulting.
You can read more about some of our previous work with students here:
Summer Intern Spotlight – Continuous Improvement Projects Ltd (ciprojectsltd.co.uk)