As the fall starts to be lurking around the corner, it's time to take a look at past few months at Sievo as Summer Seal – and how the COVID-19 flavoured summer turned out for me.
Onboarding
Onboarding of the summer seals happened during the worst corona times and it was done completely remotely (lots and lots of teams trainings…). Honestly, I was rather sceptical about remote training and did not initially have high hopes for the virtual “draw and guess” evenings – which still somehow brought me closer to my colleagues during those times when it was not OK to meet 3D people. I’d say that the remote working conditions at home even turned out to be pretty nice once I looted all the possible gear from our office.
Work
I spent the summer as a Data Management Specialist and in nutshell, my job was to make sure our customers get their procurement data properly imported, refined and published. These processes are a cornerstone in Sievo's business and should there be any issues, it was my task to find a fix with the eventual help of other Sievonians. When working with different tasks, I became not only familiar with Sievo's own software but also some common tools such as Qlik Sense and SQL – the latter of which turned to be very useful in many, many tasks.
Along with the regular work, I got my days spiced up by two summer projects : a proof of concept to a customer prospect and a pro-bono “COVID-19 –project" with Futurice. The proof of concept was a project that gave me the opportunity to follow an authentic Sievo demo with skilled salespeople and see what kinds of metrics the procurement managers generally value.
The second summer project I took part in was a collaboration with Futurice and it had the aim to predict how COVID-19 will impact the economy of a Finnish region this fall. Sievo's role in this project was to gather together invoice data with Finnish suppliers from some of our customers. This data was then anonymized and the final data set handed over to Futurice for further analysis on how different industries in Finland will be impacted by corona during the fall.
Spare time
As people say, the perfect balance for hard work is… well… spare time. And working remotely really does spare time. Mid-workday tennis and running sure were some activities I never complained about. Once the Finnish coronavirus situation started easing, it even started to be the time to organize something with other summer seals – first a picnic and finally sitsit (= student table party). One of the best things in the late summer was indeed hanging out with so many awesome people.
My kind of a «pool party»
But yeah, this summer turned out to be not bad after all and I did learn some useful stuff – now lastly it is indeed time to introduce you to my three protips about working at Sievo: