After I finished my Computer Science degree, I couldn’t think of anything else except continuing to use to my skills to help The Learning Bar (TLB) achieve their mission of giving every child the opportunity to thrive. The Monday after my last exam, I returned to work at The Learning Bar as a Business Systems Analyst. In this role, I worked closely with the Chief Product Officer and Chief Executive Officer to define areas of improvement in our business systems and processes. I would learn a lot about change management, project management, and even sales over the next year.
As one of my first tasks in my new position, I interviewed all of the staff at the learning bar to listen to the roadblocks that people faced with the technologies and processes they used. I then analyzed the results and used them in strategic meetings with executive members to aid in prioritizing projects in our portfolio.
After prioritizing the projects, I would begin work on the selected projects. I would be required to work with stakeholders across all business units to plan and acquire resources for my projects. I enjoyed having the opportunity to understand how so many different teams functioned. My unique combination of technical knowledge, business acumen, and positive personality quickly made me the go-to at the company for questions about anything from product pricing to crafting complex MySQL statements, to Jira configuration.
The projects that I spent the majority of my time working on were related to building the sales engine at the company. Sales engine projects had objectives associated with improving our sales processes, particularly those that involve other departments. I was responsible for bringing together sales team members with stakeholders from other teams, such as client services and marketing, to define processes that need to be improved and goals for success. I would then facilitate meetings between stakeholders to identify improvements and divide work between team members from one of the departments or myself depending on the skills required.
For a majority of my time as a Business Systems Analyst at TLB, we found ourselves without a Chief Sales Officer. Our CEO filled for a vast majority of the responsibilities of the CSO, but since the title of CEO comes with a reasonably lengthy list of duties already, I helped out with those that I was capable of doing. I would help Account Executives plan their sales plans by assisting them to analyze data about their territories and even how to apply best practices that we learned in sales workshops.
In addition to sales projects, I also worked on various projects that integrated or transitioned technologies. Examples of these projects would include replicating the functionality of spreadsheets as custom modules in our CRM, switching from DropBox to OneDrive, and integrating sales data with support requests. Projects like this usually impacted the most people and thus required a great deal of change management to ensure that the goals of the change were understood by all those affected and that I provided proper training so that the changes could stick.
In my last five months at TLB, I started performing scrum master duties for a team of 7 developers and coaching another scrum master for a team of two people. Before my involvement, teams used sprints and daily stand-up but did not utilize any other agile practices. I introduced the use of Sprint planning sessions, sprint demos, and retrospectives. Through the retrospectives, teams identified improvements to the process which I would help to implement.
If my first co-op work term at IBM opened my eyes to the complexities of a development team, then it is fair to say my first full-time non-co-op job at TLB opened my eyes to the complexities of a whole company. I Learned a lot at TLB, and I’m excited to see what other challenges the future holds.