Project Background
In Fall 2020 I was accepted into Georgia Tech's Undergraduate Consulting Club (UCC), a campus organization for students seeking to pursue a career in consulting. In addition to offering case interview workshops, hosting panels of consultants from Bain, McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, Deloitte, and other firms, and sending teams to national case competitions, UCC offers its members the opportunity to participate in semester-long pro-bono consulting projects with professional clients.
Seeking to gain more exposure to real-world business problems, I applied to the pro-bono program and was accepted onto a project with Advocate, an Atlanta-based technology business management (TBM) consulting company.
My team consisted of six students — three sophomore industrial engineering (ISyE) students, one freshman ISyE student, one freshman business student, and me (I was a junior at the time). Though I wasn't the team lead, I quickly took on a leadership role as the oldest member of the team, conducting client meetings and helping to manage the scope and timeline of our project.
Project Overview
Our team was tasked with working alongside a senior data analyst at Advocate to construct a series of Microsoft Power BI dashboards that would provide each department a high-level overview of its most relevant KPIs for quick reference and presentation to clients. This required working with multiple managers across departments to better understand which data and KPIs they access and report regularly, so that we could streamline their data collection and reporting processes using our dashboards.
Because nobody on our team had any prior experience with Microsoft Power BI, we had to learn and adapt on our feet — a theme that may be familiar if you've read about any of my other past projects. In fact, I would argue that this ability to learn quickly and adapt to new technology or information is the principal skill students learn in the Industrial & Systems Engineering program at Georgia Tech, and it is this emphasis that sets Georgia Tech's program apart from others.
In the end, my team delivered to Advocate five dashboards, each tailored to the unique needs of the five different departments we worked alongside, and each up to industry standard as evaluated by our research into other TBM players (e.g., Apptio). In Georgia Tech fashion, though, we chose to not only meet the needs of our client, but to exceed them by standardizing the aesthetic of each dashboard to Advocate's orange-blue color scheme, a detail that our client appreciated for its added degree of professionalism. We provided them a total of six aesthetic themes that they could select to their liking.
My Takeaways
As one of my early inlets into the professional world, this project introduced me to invaluable project management skills and demonstrated to me the professionalism expected in working with a client. I also vastly improved my ability and confidence with Microsoft Power BI, going from zero experience to functional deliverable in the span of a semester, and introducing me to the world of data visualization software that I have since come to explore extensively.
As a result of this project, I came to see UCC pro-bono projects as sort of "mini-internships" that I could do in a semester while taking a full course load, allowing me to refine my professional skills and apply my course content in real-time, and motivating me to take on another project as a team lead the following semester.
