Si je n'ai pas de valeur ajoutée, je n'y vais pas.

Rick Meador

Sogeti USA, Directeur

I have been with Sogeti for 15 plus years. One of the reasons I joined 15 years ago was the value they brought to their customers and in particular the delivery methodology behind project management. I had not seen anything like that before. It was very structured, very well articulated, very practical and very ‘hands-on’, and I learned it quickly.

Another very important factor for my joining Sogeti was of a very different nature. From the very beginning, I have enjoyed Sogeti’s support. In particular, they were very supportive of the situation I was in when I joined. I had been fired by my former company for hiring a woman with a handicapped child. By the time I wasbeinginterviewed by Sogeti, ABC News was calling me and asking me to do an interview about this newsworthy firing. But I told them that I was looking for work and that doing an interview might hinder my opportunities to find a job. I told Sogeti, but they stood by me, particularly when the story eventually ran. That gave me a very warm feeling about the Sogeti ‘family’.

I started Sogeti life in new business development by managing documentation projects and then I moved to Lotus Notes, which was tough, and then moved on to project management of software solutions, which was more stimulating.

But the most exciting aspect of working for Sogeti has been my involvement with the testing framework TMap and the Managed Testing practice that’s now evolving in the US. There is such a wealth of information that’s not been harnessed. It’s such a green field. I mean you can go out there and dazzle clients with it.

You can make a big impact, and it’s really easy to make a strong value statement with it. The clients love it.

We are doing a lot with TMap right now. We had a training kick off – I learned a lot from that – we set up a national boot camp, and I’m taking part in the TMap certification program. And ‘behind the curtains’, I am involved with recruiting. We are moving very fast in that arena. You could say we ‘make the market’ and we ‘educate the market’!

We have started to tailor TMap to the individual needs of the customer. One of the issues we’re dealing with is test automation – how to streamline the test process so that it makes it easier and more cost effective for customers to do regression testing. And when they write the manual test for the first time, they can go ahead, straight to automation. We are investigating different approaches. We have a full development and delivery methodology around TMap, from assessment to implementation. We want to help TMap to grow and do more.

When I finish my career with Sogeti, in say 10 years time, I expect to still be in the testing space. After that I want to teach; hopefully the brain will continue for as long as it will.

I can’t see myself disengaged, I want to contribute.

For some time now, I’ve been involved in teaching project management, among other subjects, at two universities in the evenings. That I find very rewarding. And from a learning point of view, a lot of the things we are doing with our customers – lessons learned, benefits and concerns, team delivery, problem-solving, team building – I use in the classroom. Students love it.

I’d also like to see Testing more embedded in the educational system. At university, students are not taught to test the software they write. Unbelievable! So I can see an opportunity for universities to offer Testing courses and degrees. They’re talking now about Project Management degrees, so why not Testing degrees? That’s one of my long-term strategies: how do we make this information available to a broader audience and create a testing practice at university level? Certainly using the skills from within Sogeti, we should be able to do it. That would be a good start.    

Being engaged is very important for me. Whatever I am able to accomplish and succeed in is only due to the feedback that I get. That’s my motivator in my business life too. What’s the value I bring to the client relationship?  If I’m not bringing value, I won’t do it.

I am pretty blunt about that. Most of the customers that I work with appreciate that. They want to know the value they are getting.