I joined Delta Partners Madrid office right after finishing an MSc in Business Analytics & Big Data at IE Business School, but there is more to my story. After finishing my Economics undergrad in Peru, I moved to London, where I did a Data Science boot camp and then worked as a Data Scientist. At that point, my profile was quite technical, so I wanted to redirect my career into a technical but also business/strategy path.

Enrolling in the Master was the first step to carrying it out. After that, I needed to find a job that suited my goal. I looked for roles in consulting firms, and Delta stood out. Besides the quality and global diversity of the team and the clients, one thing that attracted me to its analytics team (compared to other firms) is that we are actual consultants and not a back-office supporting role. Sometimes we have projects on our own, and sometimes with the strategy consultants. Even in the second case, we are still involved in non-technical business decisions as we interact directly with the client.

 

Analytics in Delta Partners

One nice thing about Delta is that there is a place for everyone. Part of the team specializes in Machine Learning, while others are great in Data Engineering. There are profiles with deep knowledge of databases and others with superb skills in data visualization. Such diversity allows us to engage in a variety of projects, either on our own or with the strategy consulting team. As I mentioned, one nice thing is that we are consultants, we get exposure to clients and impact the strategy directly.

The type of projects that we do is also quite diverse: examples are Customer Value Management, pricing definition, HR analytics, database modeling, building predictive models, designing KPI tracking dashboards, etc. With regards to the geography or the projects, even though one may have the idea that Delta Partners is 100% Middle East based, it is not the case: examples of the locations of the main recent projects are the USA, United Kingdom, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Malaysia.

 

My current project in the UK

As soon as I joined, they staffed me on a project with a new client, one of the largest telecoms in the United Kingdom. Being a new client made it more challenging, but the project, so far, has been a big success. After starting as a CVM project, it has now been extended, thus generating new workstreams.

This growth in the project scope has also led to the team’s growth in terms of numbers. It is a joint effort between the analytics and the strategy consulting teams; it started with five team members in total (three from analytics and two from strategy consulting), and now we are more than fifteen people working from four different offices (London, Madrid, Barcelona, and Dubai). One highlight is that the team is international, with people from Spain, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon, Sudan, the USA, Mexico, and Peru.

 

An analytic consultant’s typical day by day

My day starts with a daily stand-up with the whole team, where we discuss with the manager the progress of the ongoing deliverables, any new tasks, and the work for the day. After that, a large part of my day consists of hands-on work with client data. For the current project, mainly means using SQL to access the data and build different analyses.

The rest of my day consists of having internal calls with the team to brainstorm and define the commercial strategy and approach what we want to take for the analyses we conduct and external calls with the client (sometimes with the team, sometimes by myself) to either inquire on some specific topics (e.g., understand when a customer is classified as a bad debt customer once he stops paying), discuss a technical solution (e.g., speak with the Data Scientists from the client to evaluate their churn prediction models and recommend improvements) or to present our findings.

All these activities involve engaging with other consultants, Senior Managing Directors, and client stakeholders (both juniors and seniors), and that exposure is great for our professional development.

 

Life at Delta

The nine months since I joined Delta have provided me with a lot of learning and professional development, both on my own and with others. I enjoy the collaborative culture within the team: it is common to either ask my colleagues for help or help them back when needed, have brainstorming sessions to define the right technical approach for a problem, or review their code, no matter how simple the problem is. I also have recurrent one-to-one sessions with seniors, both feedback with the analytics manager working on the project and mentoring sessions where I discuss the project and my career expectations with my mentor.

Work-life balance has not been an issue so far. As expected, there are occasions where we have to make an extra effort to deliver on time, but, overall, the balance has been quite good, supported by great time management from the team (e.g., when I had to work a couple of hours on a weekend, I would have a free afternoon on Friday). A nice perk related to work-life balance is the remote work program, which allows us to work remotely from anywhere for up to 6 weeks during the year.

Beyond the project, things have also been amazing. The analytics team has a monthly catch-up where we talk about all the open projects. It is a chance to find out what the rest of the team is doing, ask for more details in case you are interested in a topic, or offer help if someone is struggling with a subject where you have experience.

In these months, I had three learning & development trips: I traveled to Dubai on two occasions (one for the New Entrants training and one for the Junior Level Offsite training) and to Paris for an offsite (training and social activities) with all the company. These trips are an opportunity to meet colleagues from other offices and testify to Delta Partners’ commitment to the development of its employees.

 

 

Luis De Col
Senior Consultant, Data & Analytics