The end of quarter meant that the last week was crazier than I’d imagined, with presentations to senior management by my team to prepare, as well as wrapping up my work for them.  (Summarising work you’ve done for someone else to present is really scary, because you can’t be there to answer questions if there’s something wrong, so it’s all got to be 100% there!)

Timing-wise my project came to a good point in the penultimate week, which was perfect. Tom, my mentor had given me a lot of freedom in how to approach my task so in my summary presentation I needed to lay out the objective as I’d identified it, and then take them through the steps I’d made in solving the problem.

In any large organisation, there’s a lot of data recording sales, returns, products, testing etc. There are thousands of entries, and many of them can have little or no correlation to each other. It is wasteful and expensive to analyse data that’s irrelevant. My solution was to develop a method that you can use to quickly highlight small areas of data that need to be analysed more carefully. I also had to leave it in a form that anyone could open and use, because I wouldn’t be around to help them.

As it’s a new proposal, I needed to explain what it was, and show with examples how it works.

The most nerve-wracking thing for me was that quite a few people in the meeting, including the head of department hadn’t seen specifics. As they’re all more expert in these areas than me I was terrified that they would notice something obvious that I’d missed, or a fundamental problem with the idea that I was proposing.

Turns out I didn’t need to worry. The presentation took 45 minutes and there were questions at the end. I was surprised how many people came along. Fred, my link in HR also came over to listen, and quite a few people in the office who couldn’t make it asked me to take them through it afterwards.  

They really liked it. It was amazing to hear that after 8 short weeks I’ve created something useful that will continue to be used.

The day and half after that were significantly less stressed, mainly filled with thankyou’s and goodbyes. So many people from different departments have taken time to teach me and help me get hold of information for the projects that I’ve been working on. My team took me out for lunch to say thank you and goodbye and then I had to hand back my pass to the building.