Citi - CTI Summer Analyst            Summer 2016

During the Summer of 2016, I interned with CTI (Citi Technology Infrastructure) as a Summer Analyst. During my time at CTI, I worked inside the Batch Management team for the majority of my time, and worked on a team of 4 other Summer Analysts during a week long Intern Challenge in the middle of the summer. 

Intern Challenge
For five days in the middle of my time at CTI, I participated in an Intern Challenge that was put on for the 19 interns at CTI that summer. The purpose of the project was to completely re-design and re-structure a website that CTI was creating for its employees. The site was called Get IT Done, and its purpose was to serve as a "digital helpdesk" website were employees could go and look up how to perform various IT related tasks such as create a firewall for a project they are working on. When an employee would look up a process on the site, they would see information such as a description of the process, what team is responsible for performing that process, and how to create an instance of that process (i.e. who to email, or what link to follow in order to get a firewall instance set up). 

I worked on the Design team, which was responsible for re-designing the site's user interface and site layout. We spent our five days gathering information from employees about the site, iterating through 6-7 different prototypes of the user interface, and testing each new version of the prototypes with employees around the office to gain insights on what features the employees wanted most from the site. By iterating our design as much as possible and gaining employee feedback after every iteration, we were able to test a wide variety of designs and get a lot of really great user feedback that helped our team focus in on a design that we felt gave the employees the most efficient access to the information on the site. 

Our final design utilized a side-bar menu that displays all of the top-level categories for the processes, as well as providing the employees with the ability to view a list of all the processes at once by viewing the site directory.  

Day to Day

Improving Employee Engagement on Collaborate

My biggest project on the Batch Management team was to improve employee engagement for our department on Citi's company-wide collaboration tool, Citi Collaborate. Citi Collaborate (or Collaborate for short) is a file sharing and social media site that Citi had built for internal employee usage. The main features of the site were designed to allow employees to collaborate on projects more easily by providing tools such as extensive file sharing capabilities, creating polls and online discussion threads, and creating projects to manage all of the files and tasks associated with keeping a project on schedule. Citi as a whole has made it a large goal for all of its employees to start using Collaborate as much as possible, so it was my responsibility to figure out how to boost our departments relatively low usage of the site. 

I performed the following tasks to improve employee engagement on Collaborate:

Evaluated Current Site Usage
The first thing I did when I began this project was to evaluate how many of our department's employees were already using Collaborate, and to what extent they were using it. This gave me a baseline that I could use to measure future improvements in employee usage.

Researched Collaborate's Features
In order to give suggestions on what features I thought our department could use to be more productive, I needed to have a complete understanding of what features and functionality Collaborate had to offer. I spent time researching every feature that Collaborate had to offer so that I knew what options were available for my department to use, and became the "Collaborate Guru" among my co-workers. 

Conducted Employee Interviews
One of my most important steps in figuring out how to boost employee engagement on Collaborate was interviewing various employees from around my office to understand how their current work style, why they do or do not use Collaborate very much, and what their perceptions of Collaborate as a work tool are.

​These interviews gave me really great insights on how so many of my co-workers did not view Collaborate as a "real work tool" and that many of them did not know enough about Collaborate for them to understand how they could use Collaborate to make their work more productive. 

Created a Prototyping Site
I created a "test site" on Collaborate that I could use to experiment with different ways to try and engage the employees on Collaborate. This site was used extensively for testing our visual re-designs of our team's existing Collaborate page. 

Educated My Team About Collaborate
After seeing how many of my co-workers were not knowledgable about Collaborate's features, I started educating my Batch Management team on Collaborate whenever I got the chance. Ultimately, this increase in their understanding of Collaborate led the team to start using Collaborate as a tool for collecting feedback from other Citi teams whenever they would give a product demo on a new monitoring tool that they were introducing to the company. 

This new use that my team found for Collaborate caused their personal User Points (a point based system that the Collaborate software uses to track how much an employee uses Collaborate) to go up by 300% - 9,000%. This was a really great example of how showing employees how they can use Collaborate productively can take people who practically never use the site and turn them into very frequent users. 

Visually Improved Existing Sites
As part of my efforts to make our department's Collaborate pages more effective, I was asked to re-design the layout of the main Collaborate pages used by our department. I focused the layout of the pages around displaying important information in a very clear and easily accessible way, as well as creating a menu for the pages that allowed employees to easily navigate between the different Collaborate pages for our department. My department will be using the designs I created this summer as the template for any new pages they create in the future. 

Created a Feature Usage Report
In order to identify how our department's employees could use Collaborate to a greater advantage, I examined all of the Collaborate groups related to our department and reported on which features and pieces of functionality each of the groups were using, and how frequently they were using those features. This report identified which features our department was using well, and which features that were being under-utilized.