12/10/09 Fourteenth Week

This week Corp (bosses from US) were in town so my management team had been working hard to produce the figures and paint the picture that Corp would be wanting to see. This meant that I had to produce some figures for my manager regarding the leads that we’d created last year which hadn’t been followed up by the sales team, as well as the ones we’d created this year and what their status was for both.

On Tuesday we ran though everyone’s work with our director who said whilst the figures were not perfect about the business story in the UK it painted a pretty good picture. It turned out on Wednesday that Corp had a slightly more positive assessment than this so the team was very happy to get off without too much of a brandishing from the chiefs. Wednesday evening I met up with one of our product ambassadors to discuss teaming up to push our online presence. The meeting went pretty well and we’ve both now got ‘take-aways’ that we need to go away and action.

Thursday came and at 11.30 we had an extremely senior manager come to talk to the interns and graduates. He was Vice President of EPG worldwide. This meant he was about 5 places from Steve Ballmer at the top. EPG is especially important as it is the segment that looks after the major corporate account that are worth millions of dollars to Microsoft every year. He spoke to us for an hour about his career and answered all manor of questions regarding Microsoft as a whole as well as career advice. Again another fantastic insight of very successful business people sharing their experience with the interns right at the start of their career.

With all the extra hours people had been putting in, my manager had decided that the offsite we had scheduled for team commitment settings needed livening up a bit. I was asked to organise this. I did a bit of research and eventually chose the National Shooting Centre to do some clay pigeon shooting. This was a fantastic venue and everyone really enjoyed the day, I’d recommend the site to anyone for a range of events. In the evening I went with the team for a pub dinner and chatted over a few beers. That evening when I got back to reading I saw Zane Lowe at a student night which was amazing, although the exact details of the evening are a touch hazy.

On Friday I had a presentation to give in an attempt to get on a team that will present to companies and panels nationwide about Millennials or Generation Y. These are people born between 1980 and 2000 which are now in and entering the workplace that have different agendas and expectations than their predecessors. Although my laptop crashed and I had no PowerPoint slides the presentation went well, I managed to add-lib enough relevant material that I was given a place on the team. I did a bit more work on my projects and finished the week early looking forward to a quieter weekend. Although there was talk of Thorpe Park on the Saturday!

5/10/09 Thirteenth Week

Monday was the Company Conference at Wembley; we got there around 11 and arrived to a variety of packed lunches and a long wall of Xboxes with the latest games and pre-release’s ready for us to trial. The day kicked off around 12 with 2000 MS employees filing into the main conference hall. George Alagiah from the 6 o’clock news was our host for the day and he turned out not only to be a great orator but also a very amusing man with a sharp wit for all the days’ speakers. We had ‘thank you’s’ for making it through hard times, what to expect from Microsoft in the near and distant future and enthusing speeches from the various segments within Microsoft. The highlight of the day however and what most people were there to see was the closing speech from the CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer.

This was a man who was handpicked by Bill Gates to take on the reins of Microsoft when he stepped back. He’d been at Microsoft for over 25 years, he was at one time the 15th employee to be employed by Microsoft and now he was in charge of arguably the largest, best known company in world history. He is now worth in excess of $10bn and has the ear of global leaders and power brokers around the world. One of the most powerful men on the planet was no more than 15m from me and he was losing his nut! This guy is crazy, people had stayed to see this man because his stage presence is legendary (honestly YouTube him). Not only is he clearly a very intelligent man but also a very entertaining speaker, when he left the stage I doubt there was a single person left in the room who was not enthused by what Microsoft does.

In the evening we had entertainment laid on in the bar and conference room downstairs, this consisted of a stage where people could get up to sing on the latest ‘Lips’ edition of the Xbox game. The group of interns I was with managed to grab a table that was front and centre of the stage. We proceeded to make full use of the free bar and copious amounts of food. Things took a turn for the better with the decidedly average karaoke ‘wannabes’ off and replaced with a cracking line up of comedians. Dara O’Briain first, Sean Lock followed and Jason Manford closed. Being as we were right at the front the interns had the piss taken out of us most of the evening which was very funny. The evening closed with a constant flow of drunken geeks, managers and muppets pretending they were Paul McCartney on ‘Beetles, the Cock Band’. FYI the Managing Director got 97% on vocals for hey Jude, business as well as musical flare!

I stayed at a hotel with a mate close to Wembley Monday evening after visiting the… interesting, nightlife of Wembley. My mate was in the events team and i had been asked by an ex member of the Server team to help out with odd jobs at the conference Microsoft was holding for IT Professional to show off Windows 7 and other more technical applications. It was a great day and we got to use of the boxes that Microsoft lease which was pretty cool. In the evening I stayed on for some drinks in the press box with some of the more senior influencers that had attended the day’s event. It was another great networking opportunity and nice to speak to senior people from outside Microsoft. That evening I went for dinner with 2 colleagues at their hotel, when we pulled up in the car park it was full of luxury and super cars. Needless to say when we sat down to dinner we felt a little out of place in our Microsoft/Wembley branded football shirts we’d worn for the day’s event! We had a few drinks and laughed it off rounding off 2 great days.

I had the choice to stay for a 3rd day at Wembley which I would have loved but I had to get back to the office for a deep dive session on Oracle our closest competitor for the product I market, SQL Server. We looked at how we thought they planned to approach the market and what we were doing to ensure people chose SQL instead of Oracle. On Thursday I continued with my projects and on Friday I worked out of the office as I had to be in Nottingham Friday night.

28/9/09 Twelfth Week

Monday morning and I needed to be in 3 places at once; in the all days presentations to Corp (the bosses from the US); the BMO ‘All-hands’ (a 1/2 day meeting for everyone in my company segment) and at my desk helping out Ian with the last minute preparations for the DMC which was the next day. Working together Ian and I made good progress, we ended up leaving the offices at around 4 to get down to London to prep the conference hall and do rehearsals with all the speakers. In the evening I met up with the rest of the team who’d travelled down to London for dinner with Corp. Once again this was not done on the cheap and I had the biggest Dover Sole I’d ever seen at the restaurant where Jamie Oliver first made his name.

The DMC went well with both session tracks running on time. My contribution of digital and social media was a success and it all came as a great relief after weeks of preparation. That evening we had a celebratory meal at a restaurant close to the venue which was a laugh and the next day the team had a late start followed by a team meeting at the hotel before commuting back to the offices.

On Thursday we had a lunch meeting with the director of our segment (BMO). It was interesting to hear the team grilling someone senior about the everyday problems they encounter and to hear his responses. Most interesting for me however were the insights he gave into career progression at Microsoft (and other MNC’s i’m sure). It was his thinking that once you get to a certain management level that you hit a glass ceiling. You cannot pass though this ceiling and onto more senior positions unless you either have international or cross segment experience and if you are not prepared to move segments or move country, pretty soon it is likely you will be made to move companies. Microsoft demands innovation which often means a short shelf life for each person in a role (4 years max) and although I understand this philosophy, there is a danger that you end up with a company of employees who could be classed as ‘jack of all trades master of none’.

Having the opportunity to hear career observations from someone so senior and so successful is why I value my time at Microsoft so highly, its having a monumental impact on the vision of where I see my career progressing.

Thursday afternoon I had 2 University friends that I stayed with in China previous to starting at Microsoft visit me at work. I showed them round the offices and I think by the time they left they were very impressed by what they’d seen at Microsoft. It was great to catch up and hear what was going on with them and to show them what I’d been up to at work.

On Friday I caught up with all the little jobs I’d missed over the previous few days and continued with my projects. At the weekend all the interns had organised to go paintballing, which was a great laugh but being a bit trigger happy meant it turned out to be an expensive weekend.

7/9/09 Ninth Week

On Monday I had a half day deep dive into the capabilities of Microsoft’s new Operating System, Windows 7. I’d been using the programme since I started even though it wasn’t due out for quite some time. It was great to see how many new features were in this OS and what can be done with a bit of training, its a great improvement on Vista and unrecognisable from XP ( in a good way). I’d suggest to anyone to buy it. As a student you can get it for £30, that’s 90% off the retail price, just go to www.ultimatesteal.co.uk/student11

On Tuesday evening I had a team meal at Madonna’s favourite Italian restaurant in Mayfair. It was to welcome Paul, a new member of the team and myself, but also to celebrate the great year the team had had in the previous fiscal year. The restaurant was unbelievably swanky and 6 courses later I was full, but not bloated and rather impressed, as well as being pissed.

The rest of the week was taken up with preparations for 2 offsites, one was the Data Management Conference I was helping to organise for 600 people in London in a few weeks time. The other was an offsite that I had organised at a trendy cocktail lounge in Reading. I had been asked to organise an event where I could get all the stakeholders within the business in one room at the same time to discuss their plans for the upcoming financial year. Although stressful and not without disruption the event was a success and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves… especially those who decided to stay for the cocktail competition I had arranged for that evening.

14/9/09 Tenth Week

This week was a relatively quiet one, I spent the week just getting on with my projects namely, exploring how my team could exploit social media to a greater extent, helping to organise the Data Management conference and continuing the work I’d started on improving the connection between sales and marketing.

On the social media project I hooked up with two Microsoft’s foremost authorities on social media to discuss creating an ‘etiquette guide’ to online interaction for beginners. It’s a big topic across the company to start using social media more, but for it to be successful there are some simple guidelines that need to be followed. For many of the employees at MS Social Media is a bit of an intriguing mystery so the plan is to create a guide to help people make the most of this curiosity.

21/9/09 Eleventh Week

This week was pretty much devoted to the final preparations for the Data Management Conference (DMC) to be held next Tuesday. Odd jobs and final drafts (and final redrafts) were the order of the week. In addition to this I continued my exploration into social media and also helped Paul to create the shared marketing campaign calendar. This was to be a document hosted on an online share site called ‘Live Mesh’ (really handy). It would be the place for all the product managers to update the news about the campaigns they were rolling out to promote their product. For example the money they planned to spend on a series of telemarketing, the expected feedback from this and the return on investment. One thing I looked to implement was a graphical view, to allow easy visualisation of the financial year to see the past, current and future campaigns. This went down a treat and it’s now really easy for us to see the leads we need to be chasing up and when we need to begin preparations for an upcoming event.

Friday came around all too quickly again and my housemate who I get a lift off into work from was flying out to Milan to play for the Microsoft Football team (lucky bugger) hence why I started a bit later. I arrived to the office to find it the usual Friday Microsoft morgue (everyone’s ‘working’ from home). That was until I reached my department where David and Ian were rushing around to get ready for the conference call with all the speakers for the DMC. I joined this meeting after setting up and clarified what I’d arranged in terms of social and digital media for the event. I filled the rest of the day with sourcing gifts for all the speakers (laptop accessories, an Xbox and booze) and finalising how I was going to get all the collateral to the venue.

Catch my next blog to see how it goes!

17/8/09 Sixth Week

On Monday I had a meeting with Andrew Fryer, an eccentric techy who specialises in database software. He took me through two of the products my department deals with, Windows Server and SQL Server. Basically Windows Server is an operating system like XP or Vista but for Servers and SQL is an application like Word that allows you to do something with the hardware (server). SQL takes data and turns it into information that we can understand and analyse. Later I met with a lady who used to be on the sales grad scheme to get her thoughts on the programme, which was very interesting. Between these two meetings I did what every other Microsoft employee does and went to war on their gargantuan inbox.

Tuesday and Wednesday were taken up being trained on a programme called Seibel. There is a very structured way that a lead is tracked from the first contact through to the closure of the sale at Microsoft and I needed to learn how this worked in order to progress with what I’d learnt from the ‘Deep Dives’ the previous week. With this new knowledge I began to build ‘dashboards’ in order to monitor what has happened with the marketing generated leads.

24/8/09 Seventh Week

I had a 4 day week this week as I had a Friday Ticket to Reading Festival which is just down the road! Monday – Thursday was filled with more Seibel and Excel work relating to the sales/marketing pipeline project. Normally I do not like this business analytical work but owning this project and fully understanding why I was doing every task in Excel made it a lot more interesting. Building a case to prove an argument with figures that you have compiled will be very interesting when they are scrutinised by people that may have differing opinions to you.

Friday: Reading festival was amazing and it took all day Saturday to recover.

31/8/09 Eighth Week

Monday was a Bank Holiday and I’d headed down to Devon with my mum and dad for a couple of days. The reason for the spontaneous trip was that I’d been invited last minute by the Microsoft Sailing Club to join them on one of their trips. I’d joined the group in the first week and said I’d love to get involved, nothing was available at the time but someone had dropped out so I thought I would try out my sea legs. We sailed from Salcombe to Portsmouth over 3 days and the experience was truly memorable. I learned the very basics of the boat and took the helm for some time, this was limited though due to the conditions. I also learnt that wind is measured from 0-12 and the majority of the time we were sailing at 6-7. When we moored up in Portsmouth it was beginning to blow a 9, 12’s a hurricane… Being a complete adrenaline junkie, seeing the 4m swell rush up on us and make the boat peak and trough was fantastic and something I want to get back and do again.

This was also a fantastic networking opportunity, one of the other guys on board was my manager so it was nice to get to know him better outside of work and the other blokes were a laugh, I plan to stay in touch. On the trip I was also invited to join the 2 week sailing trip around the Caribbean, although it sounded very appealing, price wise it was probably a bit out my budget.

Till next time..

3/8/09 Fourth Week

I started this week with a meeting with a specialist from Bing Maps. I’d emailed him in the previous week about an idea I had for customisable maps and he was keen to hear more. The meeting went well and he said they were already working on something similar to my idea however I’d put a new spin on it. It was a good feeling to know that an idea from even someone as non specialist and junior as I may have an effect on a massive product of Microsoft’s.

For the rest of the week I finalised my report on the sales and marketing pipeline project for my manager and thought about how I would now apply what I’d learnt in order to tackle some of the issues my team faced. My manager and I had decided the work I’d done on better qualifying the marketing leads and ensuring these are being exposed to the sales agents in the most appropriate way possible would be a good facet to approach first.

I ended the week in style after telling one of the members in my team that clearly he was too old to be cutting shapes on the dance floor and he should clearly outsource the job of entertaining his client to me. To my surprise at the end of the week he relented so I joined 5 other Microsoft representatives in taking 20 clients out for a night in London. This was a fantastic night and consisted of a limousine transfer from our swanky hotel to Jamie Oliver’s restaurant, 15 followed by VIP treatment at a club in London. I didn’t see much of my bed that night but my liver had certainly had enough of me by the end of the affair.

10/8/09 Busy week of work

Monday was spent planning my second event for the team, an offsite in a location of my choice, I’ve narrowed it down to Oxford University for meeting + drinks/tour or a classy cocktail bar in reading with meeting and cocktail master class. After meeting with the managers in the bars of Reading I think that idea is ahead by a whisker but nothings decided yet!

Tues-Thurs was spent mainly on meeting people from marketing and sales to see how we could better improve the leads and the process in which marketing leads in particular are handled. All very interesting and by Thursday afternoon we had a pretty good solution to how we were going to tackle some problems in the short term.

I also started my social media project by meeting a ‘social media guru’ from the marketing department to see how he thought we could use ‘sm’ to solve our problems, i left this meeting with more questions than answers.

Friday was spent in all day sessions called ‘Deep Dives’ where technical topics are explained in Laymen’s terms to goons like me who don’t have a technical bone in their body. What I did understand however was our competitors analysis and had some pretty grand ideas about how I was going to link this in with my work about my lead nurturing venture I’d planned. Next week’s going to be a good’en.

Colin

Hello,

27/7/09 Third week

Play time was over, the team was back and I had a meeting to organise for the Thursday of that week. This meant interviewing each of the team for what they wanted to see on the agenda, drawing it up and booking the venue. When Thursday came, we arrived at the off-site venue (pub with conference facilities) and the meeting went really well, running (nearly) on schedule. At the end of the day when we were having a drink in the very pleasant gardens everyone had said the day had gone really well and I’d done a great job. I was both happy and relieved my first task had gone well.

I’d spent some of the previous week interviewing as many people as possible for my 2nd task, this continued this week and I was getting a real feel of what needed to be done. I’d agreed with Matt that I could write a slightly different report to the one he originally set and I was really looking forward to getting my teeth into a project I knew would make a big difference if I did it properly.

It was on Friday that this vision was dashed somewhat however. I was right, if I’d done it right the project Matt had set me would have made a HUGE difference and would have given me exposure to some really senior people. I know this because I met another lady who had been at Microsoft for quite a while who was doing exactly the same project as me but had started the project about 6 months previously.

It was good to know that I had made the same conclusions about what needed to be changed after just 3 weeks of working at Microsoft but a little frustrating that I would not be able to take a leading role in such an influential piece of work.

Take it easy..

Hello,

Thanks for reading what is my 2nd blog and 1st first since starting at Microsoft 3 weeks ago.

So much has happened in the 3 weeks if I wrote everything it would probably take about 4 pages so I’ll try and keep it as short and sweet as possible.

5/7/09 Induction week

I get dropped off with Dan and Marcus at the Novotel hotel after my first night out in Reading with my new awesome housemates (7 MS students in one house=uni with money). Had the usual introduction talks and hastily made it to the bar, long story short the rest of the night was a good one.

We did too much to describe every day so the highlights of the week were. Meeting really senior people, trip to the London offices, clay pigeon shooting, archery, inflatable football and volleyball, free x boxes, free company BBQ with 1400 people, free corporate tickets to Oasis at Wembley, the hotel facilities and finally the nights out with 70 other amazing interns!

13/7/09 First week of real work

I am lost!!!! Microsoft is bigger and sells more products than you ever imagined. It uses ‘English’ that you’ve never heard of and talks in numbers that are hard to comprehend. To say it was a little overwhelming is an understatement. This week was spent doing admin and meeting various people from around the business for coffee to try and get an idea of where I sat in this huge machine. Don’t get me wrong though, I was having a great time and had enjoyed every second of the experience so far.

20/7/09 Second week of work

Majority of my team vanished before I really had chance to speak to them. They had gone to the Microsoft global exhibition (MGX) in Atlanta. In truth this was a blessing because it gave me a second week to try and get my head round Microsoft as a company and what the hell it was my department actually did (I knew nothing about servers or the software that makes them work).

In addition to this my manager Matt (a legendary Aussie bloke) had left me 3 tasks to look at. 1) Investigate how we can utilise social networking sites to better communicate with out target audiences. 2) Report on the current sales and marketing handover and how the lead generation pipeline could be improved. 3) Organise the July team meeting and an end of year meeting/social for the ‘App Platt’ team.

Take it easy… Colin

Name: Colin Davies Age: 21 University: Nottingham Trent University Course: BA Business (Strategy and Entrepreneurship) Company: Microsoft Job Title: IT Pro Audience Marketing Manager

Hello guys,

My name is Colin and I used RateMyPlacement.co.uk a whole load when I was researching into placements. Don’t start work until July 6th but I thought I’d do a quick intro and a bit of advice/build up to how I got myself into the position I am in now…

So first off I’m currently writing this in a really sweaty travel agents in Danyang, a ‘small’ city in China… it has a population of about 1million… I’m here travelling for 3 weeks with a Chinese friend I met at Nottingham Trent Uni. While he’s booking our train I thought I’d come on and start my blog.

I don’t want to sound like your dad but you’re probably on here looking for advice like I was 12 months ago anyway. So there’s my first 2 bits of advice in securing the placement YOU WANT, and not any old one someone has shoved under your nose:

1) Experience stuff – go travelling, join club/societies and committees and get work experience. Generally fill your time after 6th form and at uni with as many different experiences as you can. Because while academic work is important and at the end of the day, it’s what you’re at uni for; it’s NOT everything… And although I’ve done my fair share, uni isn’t just about boozing and partying it up either… while it is a lot of fun its never going to float anyone’s boat when looking at your CV or assessing you in an interview.

I know the employers I’ve been in contact with were far more interested in the stories I had from outside of the classroom rather than the ones inside. That’s what they look for, raw skills that you use everyday in life that they can utilise in the working environment. This does not include perfect referencing and sadly being able to complete the drinking game centurion won’t get you far either. But explaining how you got home from Bangkok after losing your passport will so get out and do stuff, even if it scares you.

2) Network – Networking is not for men with grey hair and business suits its for everyone and its really important that if you want to reach your potential that you start talking to as many people you can right now. Not just friends… but tutors, international students, even people on planes (I was offered an interview from a guy I met on a plane).

How many times have you heard about someone saying hello to another human being and them replying ‘piss off’!? Never, I hope. So don’t be worried about starting a conversation with someone you don’t know… It WILL benefit you more than any 1st class degree from any uni in the world. I wouldn’t be in China right now having experiences like eating freshly beheaded eel or driving up the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic with a crazy taxi driver beeping his horn and swearing at people out the window if it wasn’t for networking…

Back to the placement thing. So after I get back from China I will be moving to Reading to start my job at Microsoft. I will be employed as an IT Pro Audience Marketing Manager and although it sounds pretty impressive I’m yet to get to the bottom of what that entails, I’ll keep your posted.

I’m pretty stoked for it though; I’m living with 6 other interns in an awesome house next to 7 other students so it should be a blast. At the Microsoft offices there are many perks, free ice-cream next to the WIFI enabled lake. My office had a free coffee shop, x-boxes and a pool table located around the parameter. Best of all though I’ll be working in an environment where they encourage you to be entrepreneurial and support you in working independently, however if you need help there’s dozens of ambitious colleagues spread all around ready to help on any given project.

There it is then, a bit of advice and what I’ll be doing in the coming month. I’ll be writing another blog once I get to the bottom of what I’ll be doing at MS but in the mean time I’m off to eat some more weird stuff and attempt to navigate China’s massive train network.

Take it easy… Colin