Jeremy Smith

Having spent the past seven months working with one of the firm’s strategic accounts, I have learnt the value of building lasting client relationships. Through this period I‘ve worked in teams across four engagements, embedded within three separate business units.

Our team was engaged to build a centralised business process practice and the overarching enterprise process architecture for the client. This required us to work with many stakeholder groups across the business including IT, Network Operations, Construction and Planning functions, each with differing motivations compounded by the start-up and multifaceted nature of the company.

We ran workshops with each of the groups to determine their priorities and positions, all the while building trusted relationships with each of the individual participants.

The value we had delivered became crystal clear at the end of the engagement when the client gave refreshing feedback, describing us as the surgical team who had delivered her infant practice, and went on to give details of each of our roles in the operating room. Our focus on meeting individuals’ needs resulted in the client recognising our work as an experience rather than a deliverable.

Fast forward a few months to my most recent engagement with the client, I have been able to leverage many of the relationships I have developed to create the necessary connections to help the team build bridges with a number of stakeholder groups across the company. This made our engagement and our client more successful in the process.

As a result I now really appreciate the value of investing significant time and effort to develop trusted relationships outside of the immediate client, and have gained an understanding of how best to draw on these connections for mutual benefit. I’m confident that learning this so early in my career will prove to be invaluable!