My rotation so far..

A lot of things have happened in the last 4 months, that it is almost impossible to write a brief summary.. I am still giving it a shot!

At my cube

My project is a credit card discovery project which is in the requirements analysis phase. The initial 2 months was a lot of meetings and presentations. I was in charge for the system interfaces and had loads of things to learn in order to gather requirements. It was very challenging and a lot of fun.

Towards the third week of September my rotation manager quit Citigroup. I was assigned a new manager. Luckily I have had some prior interaction with him. The best part is that my new manager is based out of Chicago. One of the reasons I picked this project for my first rotation was that I wanted an on-site manager. I was left with no choice but to learn to work with a remote manager. I have had absolutely no problems working with my manager, he made things really simple for me.. He has made sure that we are in constant communication be it via phone or IM. One thing about the Citi working environment is that people are very well connected through Communicator, email and phone. There is almost never a necessity to work with someone face-to-face. I, in fact spend more time working with my current manager when compared to my previous manager. We are constantly in calls and messaging each other on IM.

For some reason I never felt that there was a major transition when my manger changed. I guess one reason could be that for that last 3 months I haven’t worked in one single team. I was more like a member of multiple teams. Overall I have learned a lot more than I thought I was going to at the beginning of this rotation. I can very evidently see the improvement in my people skills. One thing which I learnt from my current manager is that you should not be afraid to ask questions and the way you frame your sentences makes a lot of difference. Communication is definitely one of the keys to success.

A Morning With The CIOs

Picture source: pentagram.com

We had the NAIT CIO “One Citi” Roundtable with the TLPs yesterday. It was for this meeting that we had the brainstorming sessions. E-business CIO and Blue Ash site President Don Eichenseer joined Tim, Adam, Amit, Jason and I at the Bruins conference room at Blue Ash. The other CIOs who took part in the meeting were Al Evans - CIO, Citi Cards, Mark Bloom - CIO, CFNA and Mike Azarian - CIO, CBNA.

First all the CIOs briefly introduced themselves and then started talking about how their line of business approaches the One Citi strategy. It was very interesting to learn the status of the various initiatives within these lines of businesses. Then we had a pre-submitted Q&A round in which each of the CIOs spoke about their thoughts and approaches for the questions from the brainstorming sessions. Finally we had an open question round.

The whole idea of this meeting was to get the TLPs involved in such large organization strategies. The amount of encouragement this program receives is amazing. “We had a meeting with the CIOs of Citigroup to talk about an organization strategy”.. I think this speaks a lot about the amount importance this program receives from the Senior Management people at Citi.

On the other side of the table

Picture source: cartoonstock.com

Most of the TLPs had the opportunity to go for recruitment to their alma matter or to the University in their rotation site. I along with two other fellow gators flew to Gainesville for the career fair. It has been about 3 months since we started working on our rotation and the people in charge of the TLP program already have so much confidence in us! How many other companies allow their newbies to represent the organization for recruitment purposes?

We had lots of fun while recruiting. Unfortunately Citigroup has the policy of No Visa Sponsorship for this year after the H1-B processing debacle in April. There were so many people who were very interested in the program and the opportunities it has to offer. I guess the first round interviews are taking place at certain universities and also some second interview selections. It will be interesting to see how many people I screened during career fair make it!