CCRP - Week 1 (Thursday & Friday)

Week 1

Thursday - 21 August 2008

Even with a ton of things to write about I still struggle posting about them. Even when I blog I don't do the events and activities justice. I will do my best to reiterate what I did and learned on each of these days.

On Thursday, those who did not have company laptops received them at 8 AM. I was stoked to receive a brand new laptop with all the accessories. Several of the leaders snapped pictures as we ran through the door to find our set up machines. The leaders made it an exciting moment. I logged on and opened my email to find 80+ emails waiting for me to read. I spent a few minutes reading emails, accessing the company Intranet, and then meet up with the entire group in the larger room.

At 9:00 AM the group meet our QuickBooks Online (QBO) trainers who would be training us for the next two weeks about the product, how to use the product ourselves, and then how to help others use the product. QuickBooks Online for those who don't know is an online version of Intuits most successful small business accounting software. QBO is the online version that allows access only from the web and that is were the data is stored as well. This has many advantages to the customer because they can manage their accounting from any where, give access to others easier, and prevents customers from losing their data that might have been stored on one desktop computer when a hard drive fails or other computer failure happens (as they always do eventually).

Without any instruction on how to use QBO we were given tutorials that we individually followed to try and do what a normal business would do when first trying to establish their online QBO accounting. This was very difficult and sometimes painful. Although QuickBooks has done a great deal to simplify accounting software (converting single entry accounting into the more formal double entry accounting), its was a challenging activity. At the end of a pretty stressful day, we had a Hoe-Down BBQ with all the leaders and several of the previous years participants.

I don't have a picture of me at this event but the food was delicious BBQ ribs and fix'ns.

This is about 1/4th the people that were at the Hoe-down. Yehaaa!

Friday - 22 August 2008

We started the day with another fantastic leader presentation. Laura Fjelstul, the Supportability Management Leader explained SBD Customer Care (CP3). Having been at Intuit for 7 years, she said Intuit uses tons of acronyms. Some of them include (this is for my future reference):
O2C - Order to Cash
CP - Core Process
CP1 & CP3 - Product Development & Tech. support
CP2 - Marketing/Sales
HPO - High Performing Organization
GPTW - Great place to work
CTG - Consumer Tax Group (Turbo Tax)
XD - Experience Design
DACI - Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed
IDEA - Identify, Design, Execute, Access

She gave some helpful advise:
Focus on teamwork, listening skills, and project management skills.

Immediately following the presentation we were split up in groups and given a Business Challenge (case study) to work on as teams. We were confronted with a business case where a decision needed to be made, supported, and defended upon our presentation to the rest of the groups at the end of the day. We were so busy with the activity that when lunch was delivered we picked it up and continued working through lunch. After 4+ hours we had completed the project but still wanted more time to polish. However, we presented our idea and learned a TON from this exercise. I learned the most about project management, leadership, clear communication, and having clear roles & responsibilities.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I struggled with the performance and quality of our groups output. We definitely didn't under perform but I believe we could have accomplished much more with the time given had we better organized our plan of attack and delegated better. I felt one of the difficult tasks was in finding a leader and assigning roles to people that didn't eagerly and proactively seek for things to do. I felt like I didn't want to take charge because the role was not mine to take and because others were equally capable and even desired to assume command. If a leader dictates to team members what element of a project they will work on, then they don't become vested and usually don't perform as good of work. Also, the individual tasks were difficult to divide and then compile at the end. It was a pretty stressful yet stretching exercise. I will continue to ponder this situation for a long time and hope to master the art of team building and project management.

After all the presentations were given, we reviewed the learning experiences of the day and then were sent home a little earlier than scheduled.