A day in the working life of three Improven trainees

Michiel Smit, Pien Uittenbogaard and Thomas Rep work as trainees at Improven. The three young professionals look back on the past months at the agency and describe a day in their working lives.

Michiel Smit has been working for two months at Nouryon, AkzoNobel's split-off chemicals arm. The company has been on its own since October 2018 and is busy redesigning systems, processes and the organisation. Complex projects with challenging schedules are running in this dynamic environment. Michiel has been appointed as a project officer and, from this capacity, is working on two such projects with different project leaders. The first project is more technical and revolves around the development of middleware.

The Agile way of working is strongly reflected in Smit's work and, according to him, offers "a challenging and a fun environment" in an international team: "We just had a training course in agile, I was able to apply that right away," Smit says. "Besides, practice is the best teacher and after a few weeks I no longer look up from technical terms flying by during the daily scrum session."

The second project is centred around the launch of a new procurement system, which will go live in about 15 countries around the world within a short period of time. A "big bang rollout" they also call it, Smit reveals. There are practically unlimited learning opportunities within this project, he continues: "There are so many facets of the project that you can do something with to develop yourself. I like to join change management because it offers the opportunity to study all parts of the project and so I can create a good knowledge base."

Smit also helps his project leader to analyse and draw out processes: "A learning experience where you start to see how an organisation can be connected through different departments. In short, no shortage of opportunities!", says the Improven trainee.

Since the beginning of this year, the Pien Uittenbogaard as a Consultant for Young Improven. She started on an internal project to optimise Branding and Google campaigns. She then got to work as a PMO at Heineken in the supply chain. Uittenbogaard: "The project is fast-paced, has high performance pressure and aims to further digitise production in breweries through an app. An international programme with many stakeholders and a challenging schedule." Furthermore, the young consultant is organising Webinar Week, "a week full of calls, trainings and presentations in light of brewery digitisation," explains Uittenbogaard.

She describes a typical end of a day, beginning with checking emails for urgency and starting to prepare and organise daily progress meetings. "In these, I monitor the progress of implementation of current breweries. I record all developments in the dashboard and discuss, including risks and control measures, with my project manager." Furthermore, the Young Improven consultant is mainly concerned with monitoring, chasing and organising meetings. "I regularly check in on the skype call for the sprint review of our developing team. This is where progress and results of the sprints are discussed."

Furthermore, she deals with project planning every day. After all, the application being worked on must be successfully integrated into the brewery within 12 weeks, and for this it is important that the right people are informed and put to work, explains Uittenbogaard: "The challenge lies in taking into account the breweries' differences in cultures, times and ways of working. It is important that people are engaged and dedicated to achieve a successful result."

"Most of the meetings are held online so there is a high chance of noise," she continues. "I make sure that as many ambiguities as possible are resolved. I do this through document quality, information facilities and clear communication."

In early January Thomas Rep appointed as Global Reporting Specialist at AkzoNobel. While the job responsibilities initially consisted of handling stakeholder queries, he was then involved in the implementation of two new data systems: SuccesFactors and Crunchr. SAP SuccesFactors is an HRM cloud solution that allows employees to query data themselves via reports. Crunchr focuses on data interpretation and is more of a 'manager's tool'. "The preparation was already in full swing, so it was hard work to get 'up to speed'," Rep says of the projects. "Proactivity, hard work and a good portion of North Holland bluff helped me a lot."

With enough help, Rep managed to master both systems quickly, allowing him to "contribute fully" to the implementation of both systems. Last March was the go-live of Success Factors, a week later than planned due to priorities in America. After going live, Rep's role changed. Taking into account the new GDPR legislation, he acted as an enquirer and was responsible for Succesfactors' reporting output. "My mailbox filled up with questions from England, America, China and France," he says.

Rep dealt with stakeholder management inside and outside the working environment, preparing and delivering training and webinars, time management, tracking statistics, building/modifying reports and assigning rights (who sees what information). Looking back on his role, Rep comments: "All in all, a super challenging and educational project for me. Pigheaded as I am, I first try to solve everything myself, but when it came to brainteasers I could always turn to Guido Anninga and Masha Hennequin, my managers at Improven, rightly so."