MY FIRST BANK CONSULTING EXPERIENCE AND MEETING THE REALITY
Very excited, I came for an interview at the bank in the cold Munich winter of 2005. It was March, and I was struggling to balance on the ice surface on my way to the Hypovereinsbank.
My first boss at the bank was from Accenture, and I enjoyed it working with him for one and a half years a lot.
He was the first person at work who believed in me. I was very young and from abroad and with a little bit international, Eastern European, flair. He always told me “You will master this task!”
Put in an international environment, I was a part of the team immediately.
UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF TEST
Test and its importance for the quality of a final product is a topic which I talk about with people who are interested in maintaining a very high quality of their software programs, but this is the same for industry products like medicine machines and others.
Many companies like the bank, UniCredit with my first project, insist on error free software, the test of which was calculated with the costs of implementation of the new product within their landscape.
There, I put every effort towards the program in order to increase the quality. I was very excited to work for the wealth and portfolio management.
Many other companies do not think to deliver high quality to customers and underestimate the importance of quality assured software products.
FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE
At the same time, parallel, I attended the lectures in financial markets where I learnt how to optimise the fund portfolios, and in game theories at the Ludwig- Maximilians University in Munich. My professor in finance told me that if I want to work in the financial area, I have to attend these courses, this advice I am very thankful for.
During one work meeting with my favourite boss, I heard the first time the English word “benchmark” for the portfolios, a benchmark like MSCI and FTSE indexes on the international markets.
We had a game at the university to build a portfolio with shares in order to see their development in four months on the market, goal was to win with performance, of course, participation is important.
One way the fund manager uses to compare their fund performance development is with the index performance.
A software represents the situation, and all users have to rely on the correctness of the shown figures and calculations. The strategy for the technology is derived from the business requirements and both financial and technical knowledge are important.
DATA BASES
My major is data bases which I love.
I am very interested in the data base research and design.
For the project, I cleaned the data bases. I researched all the different data base schemata looking for differences.
Wealth and portfolio management is very important for the bank, so import and export of many work environments cleaned the data bases from redundancy and from bad quality data.
The data was used then to prove the software correctness, calculations of fees, taxes and performance.
THE TEST CONCEPT AND TEST STRATEGY
Quality of the Triple’A software was described in a test concept written by my boss who holds a doctor degree in Informatics from the Heidelberg University in Germany which is one of the elite universities in the world.
My task was to implement the test concept according to the set priorities.
There were business related and technical aspects which made this interesting to work on because of my two subjects in informatics and in economics and the strategy position.
I wrote test cases for every related part for the releases, using algorithmic approach for the different test scenarios, and I started to execute them.
I had to check the data base scripts for the portfolio management taxes under the Unix system and to send information on the different servers where the system was installed.
Sometimes, it is very funny when two or more people work on the same system
Even key board combination commands like “ctrl C” what normally means “copy” a word or a text, under some circumstances may cause the server to stop.
This is an important aspect of the information technology and especially of the test strategy because people have to decide how many test and coding environments there are supposed to exists and how much will this costs the bank to maintain, whether it is worth to use the same environment for some features and to turn into loops of interruption and finding an error which was actually a stop the server order recognised from the system. The developer was wondering why the server stops and does not compile the code.
Another tasks were to create the investment strategies for different portfolios according to customer’s wishes. Every bank’s client insists on a different strategy for his or hers portfolio that is why we develop the new system to serve the people.
The new system had to replace many old ones, so the strategies of the clients were supposed to be respected within the new one.
ENJOYABLE WORK
The Forbes article “The seven innovation secrets of Steve Jobs” -the Apple founder says the secrets are “Do what you love” which I also completely support, “Put a dent in the universe”, “Creativity is connecting things”, “Say no to 1,000 things”, “Create “insanely great” experiences”, “Master the message”, and “Sell dreams, not products”.
A work place with friendly and supportive environment and with suitable tasks makes it enjoyable to put all efforts towards company’s success.
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