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Accenture Australia and New Zealand

3.8
  • #5 in Management consulting
  • > 100,000 employees

Nicola O’Neill

6.30 AM

I wake up and get ready for the day, and spend half an hour walking my two pet dogs – Charlie & Evie around the streets of my neighbourhood.

7.45 AM

I catch a bus into the city and then walk the rest of the way to our client’s office, which is close to Darling Harbour. I arrive with a coffee in-hand and in the office at 8:20am.

8.30 AM

Everyone is getting into the office and a few minutes are always dedicated to hearing how everyone is going, especially about what we all did over the weekend, or what weekend plans we have.

Accenture: Nicola O Neill chat with co-team

8.40 AM

I log onto my computer and check emails. I spend the next 20 minutes responding to emails, and checking my calendar– I generally have a few hours of the day dedicated to meetings. This is also a good time for me to prioritise my work and see what meetings I have first, and therefore what do I need to prepare.

9.00 AM

My first meeting of the day. This meeting looks at condensing the team’s highlights into a 1hour monthly presentation to the wider department. My role in this meeting is to capture business stakeholder and franchisee feedback on the new technology rollout we are implementing, and build on results to improve future installations. Currently, we are in a “test and learn” phase, meaning that we are trying to learn as much of how we do our installations before we go to full scale deployment across the client’s Australia-wide network.

11.00 AM

The meeting is finished and I go away and document what we have. A key outcome of the meeting is to find the best supplier for a technology component. To do this, I look at the quotes suppliers provided and build a matrix to find out what is best for the client (I consider elements such as price, after-sales support, product life expectancy, etc. and then assign a weighting of importance to them). This task will take about a day, so I make a start on it.

Accenture: Nicola O’Neill - work tasks

1.30 PM

Wooooow that went fast! A few colleagues and I don’t realise the time, and quickly pop down for lunch at a sushi restaurant in our building.

2.00 PM

I attend another meeting to look the impact of removing certain technologies and replacing it with newer, improved components. To do this, a group of us workshop through our options, and my task is to distil key pros/cons/considerations and prepare a presentation that will be presented to the wider department.

Accenture: Nicola O Neill - meeting

3.30 PM

The meeting has finished and I will spend the rest of the afternoon making the first draft of what options we have, their benefits, disadvantages, and considerations.

3.31 PM

It’s a colleague – Brendan’s 31st birthday. We all stop and sing a surprise happy birthday and share in cake. Yum!

3.45 PM

I get back to work, and start on the PPT and supplier options document.

4.00 PM

Work comes in which is to categorise the project’s expenses. This is a more urgent task, so together with a colleague we assign purchase orders to categories, and then use Excel to visualise these categorisations through a pivot table and bar charts.

Accenture: Nicola O Neill - work with colleague

6.00 PM

It’s 6pm already?! The expense categorisation is all done, and I send it off to my boss for review.

6:05 PM

I look at the checklist that I did this morning of what I needed to do, and mark off what has been done. I also write my ‘to-do’s for tomorrow and respond to a few emails.

6:30 PM

Have changed clothes and now en route to OzTag!

7.00 PM

I play OzTag with a group of Accenture colleagues socially on a Monday night at Wentworth Park, Sydney. We play for fun, and sometimes we win. Like tonight! Horray.

8.00 PM

I’m on my way home.

8.45 PM

I get home, and feel pretty tired and keen to relax. I have a shower, and pop on some Netflix while in bed. That’s my night done – and looking forward to another day!