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Breakfast with colleague. Refreshed after a relaxing weekend, we brainstorm deployment challenges at a large client. We identify the source of complexity as inconsistent reports across divisions and I commit to a client discussion to propose a common template. Good eggs.
Stand up meeting with the US team. I learn about each of the client project priorities and progress from the prior week. One consultant learns about the existence of a reusable training presentation from a UK project; 1 day saved. We do need to improve our inter office knowledge management processes. Apart from that everyone has a clear picture of the priorities and deadlines. Someone interjects a cheesy optimization joke.
Internal call to discuss the HR budget and brainstorm technology integration options.
Finally review my own emails and priorities. Immediately respond to 2 contract revisions for a new client, and mark a third for follow-up tomorrow on client site … need to suggest a reduced services scope. Quickly skim software development conversations; need to stay sharp for client discussions. Revisit our project demand in light of the confirmed sale last week; this re-affirms the intuition that we are going to be over-stretched on resources next month. Phone call … come back to this later.
Call from senior consultant regarding his data investigation and proposed product list. This has huge potential so this is worth the distraction. He talks me through the new findings, then we discuss the market potential of each option. While the details are still in flux, the priority of next steps is becoming clear. He emails around some summary thoughts on the priorities, suggested next steps, and request the allocation of 1 FTE to construct the product and sales material. I’ll follow this up in next week’s board meeting.
Lunchtime. Although we start on politics, the topic of discussion drifts towards the merits of support vector machines and trends in parallel processing. They’re an interested bunch … although we inevitably attract confused looks by the swarms of bankers in our office block.
 Back to the resource question. We are always recruiting; however we clearly need to re-think our project scope to meet these deadlines. I call each project manager to apply some delicate pressure and see if more can be done faster with fewer resources … they’re getting pretty good at anticipating these questions so it turns out there isn’t much obvious room to move. We discuss the potential project levers and agree on a risk mitigation strategy; we will have to reduce the scope on 1 project by removing a few component models from the solution. I leave a message with the client to confirm this won’t affect the pilot process. Meanwhile the managers agree to revisit after spending next week pushing for the more complete solution.
Final round interview … time to extend an offer.
Respond to 2 voicemails … 1 from client seeking a new license price, and 1 from consultant seeking feedback on performance delivering a recent presentation
Polish some slides for final pitch next week. It’s looking promising. Forward to other directors and client sponsor to solicit feedback.
Head home early, head for a run. Tomorrow will be an early start at a client site a few hours away. Out for dinner with friends.
 Check the blackberry… my product development and project proposals have generated quite the email thread back in Australia. Arrange a spontaneous conference call to discuss. While I have them, we agree on the recruiting offer and on manager allocations for the new project.
Call lead engineer to learn about software development and hiring status.
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A typical workday - Consultant
Summary Time (Expand All)
Stand up meeting to discuss upcoming work for the week. For me, this week’s priorities are preparing for an upcoming client site visit and facilitating an upcoming release of our software to a new client. I’ll be splitting my time half-and-half between development and consulting.
Our latest client has requested a change to the way our software displays results from its simulations, so I’m coding up the necessary changes. I’ll verify the results with automated tests, and when I’m done I’ll let our development team in Australia know so that the new feature can be fully tested in the GUI.
I notice that in a client's latest data that their new business conversion rate has dropped significantly. Looking at the code used to generate the data, I see that an important filter to remove duplicate quotes has been removed. I draft an email to the client to re-iterate the importance of documenting all changes and suggest that we include some tests in the code so any dramatic changes in the data are automatically flagged.
 We have many clients in the US who are currently using the software, and every so often they run into trouble. Sometimes there’s a bug we have to fix, but more often than not it’s a problem with their data or with their configuration. A client I haven’t talked to a while calls up today to ask about some elasticity numbers he’s seeing and why they’re so low. I talk him through the things that could be going wrong, and we discover a problem with the data that can be fixed.
 I start work on the slides for my upcoming trip. I’ll be giving a presentation to the client team on how to use our software, so I’m making slides that explain the inner workings of the simulator, and where all the individual data components that the user has to assemble come from and how they work together in the simulator.
We have installed a new version of our software on one of our clients’ servers. I check to see that everything is working as it should – notice a few minor bugs which I let the dev team know about. Run some simulations to ensure results agree with previous version. Initially they don’t but I discover that an option which used to be hard-coded is now user selectable. This fixes things – make note to ensure everyone is aware of this change.
Call with client to discuss differences between our simulator results and what they expect from their management reports. Discuss possible causes - are we both accounting for cancelled policies in the same way, should we use capped or uncapped losses, have there been significant market changes since the management reports were produced... We agree to both get clearer answers to these questions from our end to ensure that we are comparing apples with apples.
As a part of LexisNexis® Risk & Information Analytics Group we have access to wide array of insurance information and analytics. This afternoon I have a meeting with one of our sister LexisNexis® companies about developing a new software product that will help our clients more quickly configure their simulators. We’re still at the early stages, so this meeting is all about describing our different existing products and deciding who will come up with effort estimates for any integration we might do.
Tonight I have a developer meeting with the team over in Melbourne. We discuss the upcoming software release schedule, as well as the latest ideas on the simulator redesign documentation I put together earlier. This meeting also serves as the weekly “stand up” for the development team, so we go around the conference room to talk about the dev work we’ll be doing for the week.
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