Over the past few weeks, I have been learning a great deal of new skills as a Business Analyst / Project Manager Arcurve intern. I have quickly managed to learn how to use multiple team and designing programs daily to successfully reach my deliverables and I wanted to share some of the programs and initiatives that I have been working on so far:
Figma and Power BI
I have been assigned to facilitate the creation of a dashboard on the Billable/Non-Billable and Internal hours of Arcurve in Power BI with a talented developer, along with redesigning the current Arcurvia portal page. While these tasks initially seemed daunting as I had to overcome the unknown, I felt optimistic towards learning new programs and working in a team dynamic to tackle on any challenges that I would face in the future. As a result, the first initiative I took was trying to understand the fundamentals of the program, and I looked on YouTube as a first resort. After watching a Power BI and Figma basics tutorial, as well as receiving useful information from my UI/UX mentor Adam Gaunt, I quickly realized that my past graphic design experience is going to be quite useful to launching my Power BI dashboard and Arcurvia UI/UX tasks. While experimenting with Figma, I felt a sense of fluency within the program right away as it consisted of Adobe program keyboard commands such as Photoshop and Illustrator. This ultimately orchestrated the success of my first Arcurvia website mock-up.
However, while I began feeling more comfortable using both programs, a big challenge transpired while creating the dashboards in Power BI; a significant amount of data was missing from OpenAir. This was quickly resolved after my developer figured out a way to retract the missing data by connecting with his mentor through Microsoft teams, which is an essential program Arcurve employees use daily to communicate and is what I will be discussing in my next prompt.
Microsoft teams
The most important program Arcurve employees use daily to orchestrate all forms of communication, including meetings and messaging amongst one another was introduced to me on the very first day of my internship - Microsoft teams. This program initially seemed a bit confusing to maneuver around, as I had never used it before, however my experience with similar programs such as Skype and Discord enabled me to quickly understand the fundamentals of Microsoft teams and its use within the organization. For one, Microsoft teams is used to set up meetings and presents the availabilities of those you seek to include within the meeting. This excellent feature has enabled me to successfully meet with my team and mentor, allowing me to meet my daily tasks. I found the Microsoft teams’ built-in reminder mechanism to be of upmost importance to me, as I tend to be quite forgetful when managing multiple projects. This leads me to my next prompt about the CSR project, in which all interns take part in.
Community Social Responsibility (CSR) Project
In my opinion, this is the most exciting and important project that Arcurve interns have the opportunity to participate in. This fundraiser initiative gives back to our community by providing either a product or a service allowing Arcurve employees to raise money for a charity or association in need. My team chose a foundation close to my heart as I have previously volunteered with them, called Inn from the Cold. This organization offers homeless prevention, emergency shelter, and supportive housing for homeless individuals or families with children. My volunteer experience at Inn from the Cold involved serving meals to struggling families with children as well as cleaning and loading the dish washer after their meals. While helping at Inn from the Cold I really enjoyed witnessing the happy chatter and interactions of small children with others and being able to serve them warm lunches.
My team decided to raise money for this organization through coffee bag selling and gift basket raffle initiative. We plan on selling the coffee bags by reaching out to our company community, mostly through word of mouth and internal promotion. We would create order forms and every time a bag of coffee is sold, a ticket entry into the gift basket raffle will be placed.
The CSR Project reflects the community of Arcurvians, as Arcurve is all about creating relationships, looking after each other and showing integrity to everyone in and outside of the organization. My internship experience at Arcurve so far has been amazing and I feel very fortunate to work with such a wonderful group of individuals!
