Meet Alice Doyne, a Consultant at Deloitte - our IT's not just for the boys! Event Programme Partner

Name:        Alice Doyne
Role:          Consultant

A little about me and my role as a Consultant in Deloitte’s Technology Strategy and Architecture practice.
 

I joined Deloitte’s graduate programme 2 years ago, having spent 3 years working in medical education. This was an area I’d worked in throughout my vacations at uni, and as I hadn’t quite decided what career path I wanted to take, I went back to it at the end of my degree in History. I found that the parts of my job that I really enjoyed were those where I improved how we did things – often by computerising the systems involved. So when I heard about Technology consulting, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

When I came to apply, I found that Deloitte’s offering stood out from the crowd. I liked that Deloitte had kept its Consulting service line when other firms had not, and this seemed to make a difference in terms of the breadth and depth of their capabilities. My Deloitte interviews went (relatively!) smoothly, and I’m convinced this is because I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

I now work in Technology Strategy and Architecture, specialising in IT Strategy. I help Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and their teams to align their IT strategy to their organisation’s wider business goals. I also deliver Service Management projects, where we work with IT departments to deliver services to their customers (i.e. the business) more efficiently and effectively.

As everyone in consulting says, there is no such thing as a typical day – so I’ll go for one from my favourite project so far. We were developing strategic roadmaps for a gas company, which involved running a lot of workshops with delegates who often included members of the executive board, such as the Chief Financial Officer or the Head of Networks. This made preparation really important, and part of my role was to make sure we had all the materials ready for the workshops. So I put together straw man roadmaps in PowerPoint, and prepared banners of the tailored version of the Deloitte tool we use to generate ideas in strategy workshops.

On the day of a workshop, I would get there before everyone else to set everything up. I’d participate in the workshop, documenting the outputs so that I could incorporate these into the roadmaps the next day. Sometimes the workshops could be quite difficult. Not all of the executives were happy that the Chief Information Officer had commissioned our project, and so we had to get to know them really well and spend a lot of time assuring them that our work was aligned to other strategic pieces of work going on at the company. At the end of the project, the Chief Information Officer and the rest of the exec were really happy with what we delivered – and in the process, I learned how a gas company is run!

Everyone’s busy, but in the teams I’ve worked in we’ve usually made time mid-morning to grab coffee and have a break. If we’re away, I’ll often go for dinner and drinks with my team after work – working away from your family can be tough, but I’ve always had a team around me who are game for a night out which lightens the load! When I’m in London I’ll head home to Crystal Palace for dinner with my husband. He’s in professional services too, and it’s nice to be able to talk with someone who understands how the business works.

Working at Deloitte has been an amazing experience – I’ve benefited from easy access to fantastic training, and I work with fun, intelligent people on a day to day basis.

You can meet Alice at IT's not just for the boys! - the best networking event for women interested in IT - on Friday 24 October, London.