| After working as Team Leader in Customer Acquisition Applications, in Process Analysis and Optimisation and in Project Management for a major energy supplier, you are currently working in Project Management for a leading bank. Tell us more about your project. I am 26 years old and have a Master’s degree in Engineering: Computer Science from the K.U. Leuven. I have been at Altran since April 2004. I am now consultant for Altran CIS, working at a major bank, where I handle the day-to-day responsibility of a large Ops&IT project connecting 87 application interfaces to a central transaction hub, spread over 9 countries and coordinating work in 27 teams to reach the end objective of screening all Central European transactions of the bank versus official freeze lists on a very dense timeline.
You chose Altran for its openness and flexibility. I made this choice during my last year at University. There was a job fair organised by our student union and both Altran and a competitor made a presentation. The Altran manager and a consultant project engineer simply explained what they did and how. It was an open and relaxed discussion and I immediately felt the career flexibility and opportunities that working as a consultant at Altran would offer. Altran was more convincing because they did not push a rigid career plan, but left the way open for personal career development in many areas within the company or Altran Group.
In fact, you are fascinated by the flexibility you discovered in working as a consultant. As a consultant I’m fascinated to realize how easily we can change jobs without changing jobs. We stay with the same company (or within the same group) but develop our careers by having different experiences in varying business areas and increasing the career bar by every step.
Your current project is complex but rewarding. When I started my current project management job, it was a real challenge for me in terms of project size and responsibility. Today I have learned a lot and the project is well under control, while most of the environment was expecting this high risk project to fail. The satisfaction that comes from reaching such results is wonderful.
. What do you consider to be the most rewarding part of working with Altran? As a project manager I love the challenge of coordinating information flows between teams and managing the project’s resources in order to reach our objectives. And as PRINCE2 practice leader for Altran CIS, it is very satisfying to organise courses, train colleagues and help them grow further in their own careers with the pragmatism I’ve been applying on the job myself.
You are looking forward to evolving at Altran beyond your current project tasks.
As I’m becoming more experienced in project management the next step will be direction programming or portfolio management, maybe start a parallel track in process improvement (CMMi). The bottom line is that there are still opportunities for me to grow at Altran and I in turn want to help make Altran grow further (e.g. in the PM training area) and keep working on internal side-projects.
What do you consider to have been your most valuable lesson at Altran?
That boundaries are made to be crossed.
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