INSIGHT, IIT-BOMBAY PRESENTS : THE INTERNSHIPS LIVE BLOG

BACKGROUND

This summer, I completed an internship at a firm known as “Nomura” as part of the Change Management Team (CMT). Before I get into the details of what the CMT is and, I’d like to provide some background on the company itself. Primarily operating in Japan, Nomura is an Investment Bank that came to the global forefront after its acquisition of the European and Asian Operations of Lehman Brothers, the Investment Bank that went bankrupt in September, 2008. Lehman operated a Captive Unit in Powai, Mumbai which mainly serviced the European and Indian Front Office Operations of the Firm. Under this deal, the Powai entity was also to be taken over by Nomura. Nomura themselves had no presence in India prior to this.

To service their large, not to mention very profitable front offices, such companies set up Operations Divisions consisting of Middle and Back Offices, Finance and IT, which execute processes that are continuously running behind the scenes. Captive units opened in developing countries such as India represent a major cost arbitrage to these Firms, who can save as much as 50% by simply moving (read outsourcing) their operations here. The Powai Office itself has a strength of 2500 Full Time Employees (FTEs). Note that apart from the above mentioned support divisions, Powai also has an Investment Banking Centre, where one can find Front Office Investment Bank work outsourced, a Global Markets centre, where one can find Equity Research, Equity & Fixed Income Quants, Structuring Teams (as those mentioned by Pupun & Rohit). For that matter, these are the teams which guys from the IITs and IIMs join. Lehman also had an India Front Office in Worli mainly dealing with Indian Investment Banking and Trading/Sales. I am not aware of any person from an IIT who worked there immediately after graduation.

THE ROLE OF CMT

Now given the scale of these operations, the split of work between the Regional & India offices, the continuous new stream of work being migrated, there exists a clear business case for the CMT. Who are parts of CMT and what do they do? CMT has three sub-divisions - Transitions, Business Analytics and Quality. Transitions, deals with deciding which new processes are to be “transitioned” from the Region to the Powai Office and also seeing these through till they are performed in Powai as Business as Usual. Business Analytics assists operations with the implentation of any Process Improvement projects. Quality (which is the team I was part of), deals with understanding processes, their core & auxiliary aspects, and identifying areas of improvement. In other words, CMT is essentially an inhouse consulting group comprising of Six Sigma Master Black Belts (the highest formal educational qualification in consulting) and Business graduates (MBAs) who are substitutes for large consulting firms like Opera, Deloitte and the like. Essentially, CMT is the in-house consulting group with different functions of the Operations division as its clients. Also notice the similarity between Manufacturing Processes and Financial Processes. The entire concept of a Quality team is borrowed from the Manufacturing Industry. And, as it turns out so are most of the people. You can find ex-ITC, ex-P&G and ex-GE people working in this team after having performed similar tasks in the manufacturing sector.

What does CMT do? Due to the very scale and split of operations/IT, there exist many situations, where improvements maybe possible, either in the processes itself or in systems. CMTs role is to identify these opportunties by in-depth studies, suggest changes and lead any initiatives which are begun as a result. As it turns out, most of these projects require specialized knowledge – they cannot be done without knowledge of the process which only comes with having worked on the process first hand. As a result CMT also has to drive participation of line managers in these initiatives, without which, they cannot be done. In management lingo, this is what is known as “Project Management”. For the same reason, it is strongly advised to join a role in a quality team after one has gained some experience in the field, the requisite people skills and analytical mindset. In an ideal world, one would not need a CMT. But as it turns out, Process Managers in Operations tend to be very occupied (to say the least) in their day to day routines. In absence of strong leadership and mandates, they fail to devote time to activities such as this, to the extent that they don’t perceive value in the initiatives at all. Thus, the CMT comes into being. It tends to be a team leveraged by Senior Management to drive large scale changes in parts of the organization.

IN CONCLUSION

However, the criticisms of CMT are similar to those of consulting – lack of understanding of the practicalities of the business, theoretical improvement schemes, not practically implementable and the like. But in the right company, having the right mandates and senior management support, the work can be a great value addition.

Well to start of I’m a Meta DD and my intern has nothing to do with metallurgy. I actually interned at a consultancy firm called Illumine Knowledge Resources Ltd. which is a well established firm with several high profile clients like SBI, BPCL and so on. The kind of consulting they do is what you call Transformational Consulting or Knowledge Consulting or some other fancy word you can make up (just remember to add consulting after that, you see it adds gravity).

• The Work Involved:

Ok lets get serious. They basically analyse a company’s organistional structure & the different employee profiles, after which they design and conduct ‘Interventions’. These Inteventions are basically workshops for emplyoees in which they are trained to function more efficiently (now you see why SBI is a client). Apart from being very very expensive (read: 9 figure consultancy fees) these are very well designed with trainers, videos, tool kits etc.
Now to what I did. I was part of a illustrious (read: IIM MBAs :P) team working on a ‘Career Design’ website for an European Investor. I cant for several reasons reveal details about the website but what I can do is descibe my experience. To be honest the two most important things you need to do well as a consultant is “Googling & Powerpointing”. Well what I mean is you have to know how to mine data, analyse it & present it effectively. When you communicate with clients you don’t have to use fancy english but you need to be very lucid i.e. you should literally be able to put your thoughts into bullet points & when you talk to consultants you’ll also notice they often use figures and flowcharts as well.
The work hours are as flexible as they get. 5 working days a week is a myth, hell you might have to work sundays as well if you are a full time employee. The intern was a lot of fun because of the company I had in terms of the team I was working with & overall it was a very wholesome experience.