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.