The Change

Desire leads to attachment,
Attachment leads to avarice,
Avarice leads to confusion,
Confusion leads to anger,
Anger leads to delusion,
Delusion leads to ignorance,
Ignorance leads to nothing.

Just for my sake, I'll forgive myself
From today, It's time for 'The Change'...

Mid-week Review

1. Networked with 1 from work :)
2. Pushed myself real hard to finish things by 6:30 , success so far!
3. Started doing the dishes and cleaning the floor :P

~ves

4. Yet to start meditate, reiki
5. Yet to re-start workouts
6. Yet to control my diet! :(

Negative karma for 4,5,6... enough to keep me self paced till saturday!

A Banker's profile

In my last post, I spread some random gyan on what I'd been doing to make things appear to be efficient. This post, I'll speak about my exact role.
Ever wondered how the big corporates operate? Ofcourse you have! I'm kidding... to be more specific let me put my question this way, "Ever wondered what drives these corporate houses?"
You are right, it's the bank which drives these corporate houses. Starting from basic activities like paying salaries to its employees, paying shareholder dividends, warrants, collections from suppliers, vendors to complex activities as working capital managemnet, raising money from primary and secondary markets, raising captal for acquisitions and expansion; everywhere a bank is involved. These companies open accounts with banks and let the bank provide them with complete banking solutions. The part of the bank which provides large n small corporates with complete banking solutions is known as the corporate bank. And I'm part of the corporate bank.
I'm part of the electornic banking and client onboarding team in the corporate bank. I know, that sounds pseud :P !
What my exact role is? When a deal is struck (meaning when a corporation agrees to take our bank's services for all its needs), I'm one of the first persons who liases with the company. I'm supposed to meet the clients and understand their banking needs, the level of customization required for our exisiting products, the technical intricasies of their ERP system, the various channels through which they would be interfacing with the banks (electronic/manual/ERP integration, etc). Once I get a complete understanding of their banking needs, I initiate the implementation process by setting things to action. How do I do this?
The process starts at a breakneck pace: mobilize people, mobilze different teams, speak to the software vendors, talk to the product team if any product enhancement is required, talk to the operations team to initiate the maintenance for different customer accounts & products, sit over a customer issue and rattle your heads for hours, see how efficiently a solution can be provided, understand the various banking products in depth, if possible wet your hands on the technical intricasies at a basic level to append one's understanding.
Once the initial ground work is done and the floor is ready for the game, the customer follow-ups starts: visit the client site, deploy the solutions, make presentations on each of the products provided, ask relevant people to come and train the customers in handling the products. Once this is done, you can say your work is 80% complete. The remaining 20% would be customer callups for further enhancements, additional products, etc. Once the entire implementation work is completed, I would next need to handover my customer account to the service managers who would take care of all day-day service related queries and see to it that they are resolved.
What I've done is to describe one deal in a nut shell. Am actually handling some 6-7 deals at a given point in time, and by the pace at which things are going, very soon I shall be handling 15-20 deals... now, didn't I emphasize on the importance of multi-tasking! ;)

A li'l Peep-a-Boo into my worklife

Here's a li'l sneak preview of my job profile and work environment.

Exactly 2 months and 7 days old into my job, I realize working in a bank is very much a continuation of a B school life, the difference being that, then I had a choice of working hard and free riding and now, I have to work hard because my performance is being pegged to my division's revenues.
Things which I realized these two months in my current role:

1. Be extremely good in multi-tasking - Sample this; you come to the office at 9:30 am and open your inbox and see a flurry of emails from every nook and corner of earth. Customer generated "push-mails" to get things done at my end (I get some 3-4 such mails everyday), follow-up mails from my supervisor on the deliverables which are approaching the deadline (some 2-3 mails again), some mails from your team mates (favor mails + SOS mails + coordinated activity mails), some mails from asia pacific, europe for some product enhancement, new product design (some 1-2 mails). What next? So, I open an excel sheet, put a timeline and start prioritizing my activities for the day. By the time I finish doing this exercise, I find some more mails (fitting into either of the categories listed above) in my inbox.
By this time I realize, taking up things one activity at a time and seeing it to its end would be sheer asinine. So, what do I do? I get back to my excel sheet, start re-prioritizing things, prepare Gantt charts and list multiple activities at each time frame. I never realized the course on Project Management (where I scored a measely 2.4/4.0) would come so handy to me one day.

2. Work hard, but more importantly work smart - Well, this was one apothegm which I came across in the first week at IIMB during those rough interaction sessions with the seniors. I guess, it took me over 4 terms to understand the relevance of this pithy, but let's not delve into that now. Like everywhere else, in a bank too there are ways of getting things done the smart way. Be it through those informal minutes when you bump into a colleague in a 'happy-peeing' session or those odd "coffee-with-colleague" minutes that you spend in office, networking does help tremendously. Sometimes, you get valuable suggestions of how to get things done fast, at other times it only helps you prioritize your activities well. Bottom line - network with people in your work place and allow them to show you the smart ways!

3. Help others - So much as I would like to say, a bank is afterall a money machine and likewise the people who feed the bank are also in a sense money machines. The compensations, bonuses, everything else is linked to the amount of money the bank is making. Hence, it is not too ominious to imagine that the level of competition in a bank is quite high. 3 weeks after I joined the bank, I realized the level of competition is as high if not more than in IIMB. To make things more visible, one of my senior colleagues also told me this, "Try and be selfish, remember everyone sees their own share first".
But then the last two months, I've tried to be extremely un-selfish :) I've tried to cooperate with everyone as much as possible, tried to help my team members, members from other teams in whatever capacity I could and tell you the aftermath in a nut shell: The results have been good, as they have in a way fallen back to me at times for more help - to me this means greater visibility and at other times have helped me with my own doubts - like the mentor/mentee thing which we get so used to in a B school.

4. Show results and let others know of your contribution - My father has always told me that there are different types of people in a work envorinment. Some who would be extremely hard working and dilligent with their work, some who would free ride taking their places for granted and some who would let you work and take the credit at the right time.
So when I joined work, one of my team mates who was leaving my team did ask me to be wary of certain people in my division as they were the guys who fell in the third category mentioned above. Just to make things a li'l simple and effective, I make it a point to mark my supervisor on everything I do when I'm dealing with these people. My team mates say that's a smart way of getting noticed, but who cares as long as I'm working hard and getting noticed!


Ok, enough of gyan on my work front for the week...