Moving from industry to the Business Design Team

Becoming a consultant was always in Cian’s plans, he knew the Business Design Team was the best place to make the transition.

Our Business Design team delivers operational excellence and business transformation services for our clients by working with them to identify/diagnose areas for process improvement cross-functionally, designing new ways of working to drive cost optimisation and implementing process excellence to ensure these changes are successfully delivered.

I joined EY’s Business Design Team in 2019. Coming from a business and technology background, most of my prior career had been spent in industry in Telecommunications and Insurance working in a variety of different capacities - as a Project Manager and Business Analyst across Digital, Finance, IT and Product Development.

My background of cross functional projects across Business and Technology meant being a consultant was always in my career plan, and thankfully the right opportunity presented itself to join the Business Design team at EY. The Business Design team’s role is to support clients through operational excellence, cost optimisation and business transformation. From day one in the team the atmosphere was friendly, welcoming and somewhere I immediately felt comfortable.

Since joining EY I’ve been privileged to work on interesting transformation engagements, one engagement involved the upgrade of a high volume transaction legacy payroll system to a future-focused digital first system. My role on this engagement was to work with the client to map the ‘As-Is’ and ‘To-Be’ states of the current and future system and then working with the client, writing the functional requirements for the new system. This was achieved through running regular investigation and validation workshops with a broad range of client stakeholders to ensure all the right requirements were captured and were aligned to the project vision.

Another engagement involved a large scale Finance Transformation within a government department, migrating legacy finance systems to one standardised Financial Management System to enable audit compliance, standardised processes and flawless functionality for the client and end users. My role on the engagement was to carry out business analysis and lead the Test and Hypercare workstreams, including test case management, risk and issue management, and preparation of key documentation such as strategy and stage gate exit reports. Strong stakeholder management was essential in this role to ensure a seamless delivery to the client, liaising with both end users and third party providers.

With a background degree in Business and Spanish and a Master’s in e-commerce it wasn’t until I entered the world of work that I fully understood that my passion was helping companies realise their transformation goals. Now getting the opportunity to live this daily at EY, I would say the key skills for anyone looking to make a move into our growing Business Design team are the abilities to be client centric, foresee opportunities for process improvement, cost optimisation and be able to translate complexities into simple solutions

If you’re looking to join a truly global firm that is committed to the development and training of its employees and have a similar background in both business, tech and experience in business transformation, then I encourage you to get in touch.

Article is authored by Cian Gildea, Senior Consultant, Business Design.