Lucy Rollinson
Consultant – Robotic & Intelligent Automation
Deloitte
I found Deloitte’s BrightStart apprenticeship programme while researching various different career options. Consulting struck me as unique opportunity because every day seemed to be different. I felt starting out in this career would allow me to experience lots of different industries, clients and projects and find what I really enjoyed. This has been true of my experience in consulting for the past three and a half years, and it’s the main factor of the job that I love.
Upon joining Deloitte, I quickly found an interest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and have focussed my career in this area. I began working with this technology right at the beginning of its introduction into businesses, when many clients were trialling or getting a taste for what it could do to help their organisations. Fast-forward 3 years and I now work with many clients to deliver large scale automation transformation programmes.
It is really exciting for me to see how RPA has grown and how it is moving quickly towards more intelligent solutions such as Artificial Intelligence, an area that I am excited to be involved in. Internally, the automation team has also grown globally and more locally across EMEA. Last year I attended an ‘Advanced Business Analyst Bootcamp’ training week in Spain for the EMEA network. We had 30-40 attendees (mainly people that I hadn’t met before) and it gave me the opportunity to expand my network and to hear from teams in other geographies about their client experiences.
A typical week for me starts with travelling either to client site or into London if I am working on an internal project. So far I have been across the UK delivering client work, including summers in Cambridge, punting on the river was a highlight here, and also a few weeks in India. My experience in India is my favourite career highlight, where I was delivering business analyst training for my client’s team. The team spanned several different nationalities and this created a real buzz and a fantastic dynamic for the week of training.
My role as an automation business analyst involves engaging with senior client stakeholders to spread the message of the potential for automation and identify new opportunities for the roll-out of the technology. On a daily basis, I am responsible for working with technical development teams and business process experts to take a project from design, through development and testing to go-live. I often work with multiple developers and subject matter experts at a time to deliver process automations, meaning that usually day-to-day there is a new milestone being met by one of the teams.
Go-live is the most exciting time as this is when the end users finally get to see the benefit of automation. Hearing their praise and relief that they no longer need to do the manual processes makes the challenging weeks in development and testing all worth it. I really enjoy this role as I have been able to witness first-hand the benefit that automation has delivered in many of our client’s businesses by delivering better service to customers and improved job satisfaction for their employees.
My career at Deloitte is brilliant! I have been able to work with, and be supported by, fantastic teams and individuals which makes the job fun and rewarding. I would definitely recommend consulting to anyone that is interested in gaining experience in a flexible career where there is always opportunity to take on challenging and stretching roles.
My advice to anyone starting their consulting career would be to embrace change and take every opportunity as a chance to learn.