Third week at QA Consulting

Third week Blog:

So far at QA Consulting I have really enjoyed my time meeting people, doing work and socialising after work. I am getting slightly more used to working 9–5:30 but it’s still hard getting up. I have been assigned a c# job in Woking with 3 other people but I’m not sure if it’s a definite or not as I haven’t heard anything else about it yet.

Some guys from a different group in QA organised football for the office and we played a 5 a side tournament. There was a good turnout of around 20 people. The team I was in was decent and we won the tournament.  During the week after, some guys in my group decided we would try and make it a weekly thing. The next Tuesday we got 10 people down to the 5 a side pitch to play for an hour which was great.

During the last couple of weeks we have been working in teams of 8 on Enterprise Architecture (EA). This consisted of acting as a consultancy firm called “Rambert & Rooster”(R&R). During the first week of EA, we were located in the Lowry which is a theatre in media city. This was a nice change of scenery and the round tables really worked well for collaboration between the members of the group.

As R&R, we looked at the company “NB Gardens” business processes. NB Gardens had very poor processes all round and we had to work out a solution that would fix their problems.

      Their problems areas were:

•             Order replenishment process
•          Customer order management process

We had to carry out interviews with staff members from NB Gardens to practice interview techniques. This was important as if we didn’t ask the correct questions; we didn’t get the correct information we needed, so a lot of preparation was needed.

Our solution was:

·         Add more IT to all departments to get the process to be faster, more efficient and more reliable.

·         Merge the call center properly and merge COFT with them to make the process more streamlined

·         Implement a Quality department to allow the company to resolve future issues internally and carry out process improvement on a regular basis

At the end of the 2 weeks we had an exam on all the stuff we covered and a presentation to show our groups findings to the “company”, NB Gardens.

Last week I had to write a technical blog in which the topic was computer hardware. Since this was the first blog on the topic I did a general overview on things to note, which parts you need and a bit about each part. For my upcoming technical blogs I will be looking at specific parts of a computer and look into important aspects of each one in detail.

Overall I think my first month at QA Consulting has been good.  I have met a lot of really cool people and hope to meet more soon.