MBA Essay - Six Substantial Accomplishments (Part 2 of 6)
August 9, 2009
“Because I think in a broader way, I feel like I am able to make better decisions” - Takafumi Horie.
One of my most substantial professional accomplishments occurred when I was deployed by a top tier professional services firm, Blackinsey & Company, to evaluate the adequacy of a Vendor Management Framework developed by SYNERGY (a Fortune 100 company) to manage outsourcing risks.
In order to test the adequacy of the framework, I researched knowledgebases and benchmarked the framework against best practices; though SYNERGY’s framework contained many elements of a standard vendor management procedure, two critical components were missing. Firstly, while the framework required SYNERGY’s employees to perform risk assessments in order to identify the key controls within the processes been outsourced, the framework did not provide the step-by-step instruction to accomplish this objective. Secondly and much to my chagrin, deviations or exceptions (management override) to the vendor management framework were required to be reviewed and approved by an employee at the staff level.
To address these gaps, I recommended that before a business process is outsourced, the departments initiating the purchase requisitions should first and foremost review process documentations such as SOX* narratives, flowcharts (system and process), policies and procedures to identify the key controls within the process in question. After identifying the key controls, these controls should be categorized into two buckets namely (a) controls that will be outsourced to the external service providers and (b) controls that will be managed internally. Once the controls been outsourced are identified, SYNERGY should get assurance from the vendors that they have adequate infrastructures in place to safeguard the outsourced controls from been compromised. This objective can be achieved by obtaining and reviewing professionally certified documents such as SAS 70 report from the vendors.
I also recommended that exceptions or deviations from the third-party framework should be reviewed and approved by an employee at the Executive Vice President level rather than by an employee at the staff level because exceptions to the framework constitute management overrides and should be handled by employees who understand the risk-return dynamics of their decisions (e.g. an Executive Vice President).
I consider this a great accomplishment because I completed the project in two days although the review was initially scheduled to last for two months. The management of SYNERGY was very impressed with the quality and timeliness of my review and awarded additional multi-million dollar contracts to my consulting firm. Once again, I moved the ball to the end zone and helped a client - a Fortune 100 company - find solutions to a critical business problem, winning new businesses for my company in the process.
* Sarbanes-Oxley.
NOTA BENE: The topic I chose in this essay is random and not a real accomplishment for me. It is just a rhetorical exercise. This is a draft and designed to help you with your MBA applications. Created under the Creative Commons rule and it is copyleft. Use as a guide for your essays. I plan to collate and refine the essays I have posted on Black Herald and publish a book of MBA essays in the future.
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