Rick Maher’s Professional Notes

Inspired by a recent article in the magazine BestLife I decided I better get back to blogging.  The article specifically mentioned blogging as a means to improving one’s ‘Google image’ or the results returned when a potential employer runs your name on a search engine.  That was precisely the reason I started this blog.

However, that reason has never been the reason for actually maintaining it (as can be seen in my lengthy intermissions).

I have always liked exploring my ‘professional side.’  And on that front, nothing has changed.

I am now 10 months into my job with the Operations Consulting firm previously mentioned, and loving it as much as ever. As of January 1, 2007 I was given a promotion, from ‘Consultant’ to ‘Analysis Manager’.  The new role is quite a bit different in that instead of working on projects (developing, installing, and building sustainable operational improvement changes), I am now on a small (7 people) team that does the pre-project scoping and the final steps of the project sales process.

Anyone who has interviewed or considered interviewing for a management consultant job has read the questions like ‘how many phonebooths are there in NY City?’ or ‘How many white dishwashers were sold in North America last year?’

Well, my job is basically to ask those types of questions in terms of our potential clients, then determine the answers. In one weeks time, the Analysis team evaluates a business’s operational execution, determines the opportunity in terms of increased throughput, increased capacity utilization, decreased overhead, etc. then correlates that opportunity to an improvement to the company’s bottom line. From there we communicate to the President or Owner of the company the opportunity we found, the correlation of capturing a portion of that opportunity to the bottom line, and a rough outline of how the project team would go about achieving that opportunity capture.

It’s all pretty interesting stuff I think.  Even if I do typically work in the range of 80hrs per week.

You can probably imagine that is why this post is so helter skelter and hereby being cut-off.

More to come for sure.