Management essay

Running header: GRADUATE MANAGEMENT EXTERNSHIP 1

Curricular Practical Training (CPT)

Anirudh Talakanti

ATALAK7027

Sullivan University

Week - 10

MGT 597: Graduate Management Externship

GRADUATE MANAGEMENT EXTERNSHIP 2

Introduction:

I am Anirudh Kumar Reddy Talakanti, student at Sullivan University with the MSMIT

program. I have done my masters in Computer engineering and bachelors in Mechanical

engineering from Jawaharlal Technological University in India. I am pursuing my Graduate

Program (Masters) to focus more into Analytics, Database Management and Distributed

Networking. I have a natural interest into the Analytics part of the world and always wanted to

work in that area. With that in mind, I got some training in SAP Business Intelligence and Oracle

Business Intelligence tools. I got my first opportunity to work with SAP Business Intelligence

(Business Objects tools). Though shaky in the initial few months, I worked hard and I was able

to stabilize in that technology. I got to communicate with different cross functional teams which

helped me not only with the technology, but other aspects of typical work environment. Due to

the nature of the technology I’m working now and want to pursue further, I needed some more

in-depth knowledge in exploring, analyzing databases and some management skills as down the

line my target is to lead a team and manage projects on my own with the Analytics technology

(McKenna, 2010). From where I’ve been working for the past 2 years, I explored several options

and zeroed in on Sullivan University to pursue this goal and gain knowledge in the areas I

wanted to which would in turn help my career in the long term. Technology wise, I got a very

good start and I’m improving my skills in that area as time goes on and at the same time learn

something new at regular intervals. To be able to sustain in the technology field, I intend to

constantly be updated on the latest changes in the technology and at the same time establish and

excel leadership and management skills which would help me move up the ladder in the

organization. My target is to master Technology + Management.


Professional Experience - Overview:

My Under Grad helped me with the start I needed in the training when I started to venture into

the area of Business Intelligence. This required my skills in computer science and also Business

Analysis skills.

I’ve been working in IT for more than 3 years now and my focus of work has been in Business

Analytics / Business Intelligence area. I’ve used different reporting tools from SAP Business

Objects Enterprise Suite like Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence and Explorer for delivering

detailed, ad-hoc and exploratory views based on the Business users requirements (McKenna,

2010). As an integral function to this job and technology, I communicate with technology

functional users, business end users and senior management in trying to understand the

requirements and necessity of these reports and how they help them drive the business and

decision making about Key Performance Indicators. Based on their needs and the objectives, I

choose the right tool and deliver the respective reports accordingly (Dyne, 2009). Once the end

product is ready, I conduct end to end validations to make sure the data reports are presenting is

accurate as these can be the driving factors in key decision making in a lot of scenarios.

I also help them train with the tools in terms of usage of the reports so that they can fully utilize

the tool features to explore thru the reports for better understanding and analysis (Dyne, 2009).

Apart from working with the business end users, I work with the Application Support and

Database support teams in regular intervals to troubleshoot issues in case of any problems

reported by the business end users once they start using the reports.


Professional Experience - Detail:

To explain what I learned in my professional experience in detail, I’m laying out information on

a few projects I’ve been working for the last 2 years at Lexmark International. I work for the

World Wide Analytics team and part of the Analytics Design/Development team. I have 5 more

colleagues in my team and we all report to our Manager. Actual Work deliverables are assigned

by our manager to our team depending on our skill area and the requirement (Bruce, 2010). Most

of the time I worked on 3 Reporting tools, Business Objects Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence

and Explorer.

Project 1 MPS Phase 1

MPS is Managed Print Services which is a new wave of services by Lexmark where in they

manage the print services for a customer from Day 1 till whenever they needed. The services

would include Initial setup, Installation, Maintenance, troubleshooting, upgrades etc. The project

spanned across Sales and Accounting functional areas and the business end users of the

respective areas had some specific reporting requirements for their business analysis once the

project goes live. If we delve into one of the requirements in Sales functional area, To be able to

view Open Orders based on some Delivery and Billing conditions being met. Based on this my

first step towards building the design for the report was to meet the Functional specialist in the

Sales area to understand where the data lies and how the configuration was between Sales,

Delivery and Billing areas. Once I understood the common link between these areas, I started the

initial design in the Business Objects IDT to build a Universe including the concerned database

tables and established the connection between them by implementing the database joins

accordingly. I’ve added the conditions mentioned by the business users as filters in the design so


that the data is restricted as desired by the users. This got validated and desired fields have been

added as objects in the Universe and then the Universe as an object (Sales_Open_Orders.unx)

got published in the repository. Then came the part of building the actual report using Web

Intelligence tool where I started building a blank report with the data source being the universe

built in the above steps (Sales_Open_Orders.unx). To the report output, I’ve added whatever

fields user wanted to see. Once all the required fields are in the report query, I’ve made some

customizations which included a bar chart for top 10 Customers based on the total revenue of the

open sales orders for the respective customers. I’ve also included some alerts, rankings, drill up

and down options etc. Got the data in the report validated and promoted to Production. Trained

the users as to using the report for their analysis

Project 2 CDM

CDM (Channel Data Management) project was for the Marketing team to analyze the Lexmark

data coming from Channel sales personnel and Reporters. One of the key reports delivered to this

team was Finance Trend report by Geography, Segmentation area, Markets and Product Line.

The design and development was done similar to the MPS project mentioned above. The key

objective for this report was to be able to see the trend of revenue, sales units etc by current year

vs. prior year (2013 vs. 2012), current year’s month vs. prior year’s month (Jan 2014 vs. Jan

2013) and current year’s quarter vs prior year’s quarter. Different tabs presented with data and

charts of these trends based on Geographies (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia

Pacific), Product Lines (Printers, Options, Supplies, Warranty), Segmentation areas (Channel,

Enterprise) and Markets (some key markets like Germany, Italy, China, Mexico etc).


Lessons Learned and Areas of Improvement:

There are quite a few lessons that I learned thru out my experience so far. One definite area is the

constant technology changes that went on as time progressed. I had to constantly update myself

with the new versions of the technology, new features and functionality that come with it, key

upgrades and challenges etc. Also, there were some areas where I lacked necessary exposure to

go to that extra mile which included efficient database analysis, functional concepts in Finance,

Issues due to performance and networking. One other area where I wanted to improve was my

leadership skills. I’m really interested to be able to lead a team and manage project

implementations on my own. The additional responsibility is something that challenges me in

addition to the technology aspect.

Current courses and Academic Objective:

In my first semester at Sullivan, I took up Managerial Communication skills in order to learn and

improve on the communication and other aspects in management. It helped me with the same

and also some useful and effective ways to communicate with different teams and senior

management. In the current semester, I’ve taken up Data Mining and Managerial Finance for

further help on the areas I’m lacking and to get a firm grip on. Thru out my experience in the

Business Intelligence area, I’ve had the need to analyze the data layer part of the applications.

Due to some complex reporting requirements I’ll need to go thru the database architecture to

analyze and detect certain information which would help understanding and solving some

problems.

The process of analyzing this data from different perspectives will be an essential help to my job.

One other area I’ve always had interest is networking and the way different components in a

network communicate and affect the performance of anything we end up developing. There were

numerous occasions where I’ve had to analyze some performance issues and one primary reason

can be the network and the applications residing in different areas of this network. Since the


companies I’ve worked in deals with multiple of these distributed systems, the course of

Distributed computing should help me understand the concepts around these.

Managerial Finance is one other course I took up this semester is to get to understand the

Managerial approach towards Finance and accounting. Not only to understand the approach

towards finance and accounting, but also towards the perspective of the management to

understand. This would indeed help me in the long term in both management aspect as well as

finance and accounting.


References:

Dyne, L.V., Ang, S. & Livermore, D. (2009). Cultural intelligence: A pathway for leading in a rapidly

globalizing world, Pfeiffer Publishers, San Francisco, USA.

McKenna, T. (2010). Communicate to Improve Job Performance, 102(6), 15-15. Retrieved from

Business Source Complete Database.

Bruce, P. C., Patel, N. R., & Shmueli, G. (2010). Data mining for business intelligence: Concepts,

techniques, and applications in Microsoft office excel with xlminer. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &

Sons.

Management essay

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