Hi all! My name is Teemu Kukkola, and I work as a Consultant at PwC. I joined PwC when I was finishing my studies at Aalto University School of Business in February 2019. During the last 3,5 years I have had the chance to work with different kinds of local and global projects within different roles. For example, at the moment I’m working on a project where our client is renewing their payroll processes and systems globally. My main stakeholders currently are from Finland, Central and Southern Europe, and Asia.
Normally my days start at 8.00 with a daily status call with the client’s core project team. Usually, half of the day I’m tied up with different meetings in Teams, as my main stakeholders are from outside Finland and half of the day, I have time to prepare for upcoming meetings and create materials to support discussions with client and their service providers. I need to make sure on a daily basis that all the required tasks are done by the client and service provider so that the project can keep up with the agreed schedule. As a consultant it is important to realize that usually the counterparts from the client side also have their normal daily tasks that should be taken care of. This means that they cannot always complete the tasks in a schedule as I would want so social skills and empathy are really important attributes that a consultant must have. To be able to work with a client you need to be able to act as “kitchen psychologist” but also every now and then you need to adapt to a role as a “kindergarten teacher”. Usually I end up my day somewhere between 17.00 and 18.00. This leaves room for other stuff as well which is important for me.
In addition to this project, I’m currently working with internal account work where I’m acting as a client driver, solution work where I’m acting as a solution driver. Occasionally, I’m also supporting a consulting recruitment process as an interviewer. It might seem that there are a lot of different tasks but luckily not all of the tasks occur on a daily basis. I have the opportunity to plan my daily routines in a way that the days are feasible, and I have free time as well to go out running, working out and see my friends.
In the project I mentioned earlier, I work as a project manager and my main role is to act as an intermediary between the client and their service providers. This means that I work really closely with the clients’ local teams in different countries and help them solve different planning and preparatory related tasks. If we are unable to solve these issues together, my task is to find the correct people to help us to solve the issues. In addition to this, I help the clients service providers to get answers to their questions from the client side. The questions may vary from process related questions to specific data related questions, like what the correct address format is to be used in SAP or how many days it takes to process the salary payments, so that the clients’ employees will receive their salary in time.
Roles as client driver and solution driver are internal roles where I’m involved with the planning work. We need to make sure that our backlog with project delivery is full and if that requires planning on for example, who are the key stakeholders from the potential clients’ side, what he or she is interested in or how we could help them look better in front of their supervisors. This requires preparing meeting materials for these meetings and also sometimes meeting the actual clients with our senior management team from PwC. Meetings with clients help to create better understanding about the topics that the clients are currently struggling with, and this also makes it easier to prepare the right kind of materials to support the discussions with them.
The solution driver work is currently in an interesting phase as we are ramping up a new solution called Customer Transformation. Customer Transformation is an umbrella that gathers e.g., Customer Insights, Customer Strategy, Customer and employee experience and Commercial Optimisation. As my own background contains sales related and stuff where I’ve closely working with clients it is interesting to be planning, facilitating and participating in discussions within our team that where should we focus on and how should we prepare ourselves to make a compelling story around our solution that will convince our clients to choose us to help them be more efficient in the future.
- Teemu