A peek into a tech consultant’s day

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When you say “tech consultant,” do you imagine a boring, bespectacled desk worker, doing the same old routine every day? Allow Anthony Hollen to smash those stereotypes.

A young, eloquent individual who spends his spare time on photography and music, Hollen is a tech consultant who has been working at Accenture since October 2015.

“Accenture is all about living in the new,” he shares. “We solve our clients’ problems through innovative solutions and technologies, especially with our end-to-end capabilities to transform businesses in the current digital age.”

The global firm was Hollen’s first choice of employer upon graduation – and he’s never looked back since.

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A unique job that brings you closer to Asia

Michelle Young, a newer addition to the firm, explains, “The clients have a lot of data, but they don’t know how to make use of it. They have a Lamborghini, but they aren’t using it properly. That’s where we come in to understand their business and put their data in a structured format.”

Winsor Lim, another tech consultant, adds, “Accenture is very project-based. The day-to-day can be very different, depending on the phase of your project in the system development lifecycle.”

While a purely consulting job may last about two to three months, a multi-phase SAP implementation project can take years to complete. In data processing, SAP – which stands for “systems, applications, and products” – is a modular system that helps a business develop and integrate new processes.

While a multi-phase SAP project may take a while to complete, don’t balk at the long timeline. Every phase takes you on a different journey, and one of them may include traveling to a city like Shanghai or Beijing.

“People in China would have a very short lunch, and quickly head back to the office to have a 30-minute power nap.”

That was what Hollen did for five months, alternating between working abroad and returning home. And one aspect of Chinese working life that he found “really interesting,” he says, was its “power nap culture.”

“People in China would have a very short lunch, and quickly head back to the office to have a 30-minute power nap. The effect on the work productivity is amazing because they will be more energized in the second half of the day,” he recalls.

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A day in Hollen’s life

These days, Hollen works at his client’s office in Singapore with a team of about 30 Accenture consultants. He walks me through his most recent Monday, giving Tech in Asia’s readers a peek into his work life.

8:30 am
The day starts with Hollen reaching the office, where he’s been stationed for the last two and a half years. Although the company’s official hours start at 9:00 am, he always arrives early.

Hollen manages multiple teams of analysts across Singapore, Manila, and Shanghai, and his inbox is constantly flooded with messages. While waiting for it to load, he makes a cup of tea – his fuel for the morning. He then tackles the first batch of emails that are directly addressed to him, before moving on to less urgent ones.

9:30 am
Hollen’s first call of the day is with his Shanghai-based analyst, who updates him on the incident ticket resolution in China. Clients send incident tickets to raise issues they’ve faced with the newly implemented system. Having deployed its SAP solution only a few months ago in January, the clients are still under the support/warranty period, when they tend to send a fair number of tickets. Some require Hollen’s assistance to resolve.

10:30 am
Apart from providing warranty support, Hollen also deals with custom report development for the same Chinese clients on the side, which can range from service metric to financial data reports. At this time, he meets with them to gather the requirements for a custom report. He points out that this process is like “going to a tailor,” as it involves choosing a suitable reporting engine, designing the report layout, testing the product on the clients, fixing bugs, and deploying the custom report to support the client’s business operations.

An example of what consultants might get in a Singaporean food center / Image credit: Pexels

12:00 pm
For lunch, Hollen either grabs a bite at a “mixed-rice stall” (Chinese food in Singapore) across the street or opts for a takeaway salad that he gobbles down in the office pantry.

1:00 pm
He writes an email to those who attended the 10:30 am meeting, detailing the requirements, key decisions, and follow-up actions he captured earlier. At the same time, he updates the relevant documents, from functional specifications to process flow diagrams.

2:30 pm
Now on a weekly scheduled session with his offshore developers in Manila, Hollen receives updates on the build status of the custom development project and clarifies any concerns there may be.

3:30 pm
He reports back to his manager in Singapore with updates on everything, from the incident tickets to the custom development, as well as other miscellaneous administrative matters.

4:30 pm
A meeting with Hollen’s onshore Singapore client begins. They discuss any new requirements or changes to existing reports and custom programs.

5:30 pm
Immediately after receiving the client’s requests for changes, Hollen conveys them to his offshore developer over a call. He also makes sure to record them himself in a change request document for the client to review.

6:15 pm
Typically, this is when he gets a bit of time to himself. But today, a few colleagues approach him for some help on authorization testing. The clients need certain authorizations to access SAP transactions. When changes are made to the system authorization matrix, they will enable and disable the clients’ access to certain transactions. So, these authorization changes have to be tested. This is where Hollen steps in, advising his colleagues on the changes and their outcomes.

7:00 pm
Hollen knocks off after a final round of checking his email. If there are more urgent messages to reply, he will leave later at around 7:30 pm – though this is a rarity, now that he’s in the final phase of his project. All in all, he’s spent about 10 hours at work.

For Hollen, each day at work is different. This is just a snippet of his life as a tech consultant, which is ever evolving. Once he completes this project, he’s on to the next one with a new company in a new industry and a new workplace, where the opportunities are endless and exciting.