Angela Nguyen

5.40 AM

Alarm buzzes and I’m up! I brush my teeth, get into gym clothes, and grab my lunch from the fridge. I’m out the door within 10 minutes and drive to the train station. It’s a Tuesday.

6.10 AM

I hop on a train to Flinders St Station, Melbourne as it’s the closest station to my gym. The sky is still dark at this time, so I usually read or listen to music to ease into my morning.

6.50 AM

I’ve made it to the gym. I fill up my bottle, warm-up, then make my way to the kettlebells. I train resistance two days per workweek, and cardio the other three days.

7.45 AM

I pack up and walk back to the office to have a shower. The showers are located in the basement of the building along with the bike lockers. There are fresh towels every day, and the lockers are ventilated.

8.30 AM

I arrive on my floor. First thing’s first: pop my lunch in the fridge!

I grab my laptop from my locker, set up at a free desk, and say good morning to my team. It’s pretty quiet in the morning and the floor uses hot desks, but teams gather in specific pockets of the floor. We usually like sitting in the corner close to the windows – I grab a desk with two monitors.

I open up my notebook and my calendar to make a prep list for any meetings that I have for today. I also read and file emails that I have received overnight – this one is particularly important as it relates to the business performance review (BPR) pack and one of the capex reports, so I flag it and move it to my ‘ACTION: ASAP’ folder. All other emails are filed away into a folder that is named after their main output.

I touch base with my Senior Lead about the status of our journal postings, and then I start making my way through the prep list. Anything high priority is completed first, followed by anything that can be completed within 5 minutes if time permits.

10.00 AM

The team heads into a room to hold our weekly team meeting. We use the video calling facilities as we have a team member in Brisbane and some of my colleagues are working from home today.

 

The focus for this week is the BPR pack and the reports that go into it. This pack is made every month to report on the financial standing of the function Networks and IT as a result of the previous month’s activities. We communicate these reports up to the executives in the function, mainly looking at the costs from different perspectives including a view from the function, their lines of business, and associated projects that they want to undertake.

On a day to day basis my colleagues, known as finance business partners, are each assigned a line of business. They give updates on the status of any information, specifically journals, that we are waiting on. Any ad hoc work is also assigned in this meeting. I’m given the task of automating a new report that the executives have requested.

11.00 AM

I start to work on this new report. The executives want to see how costs move between Networks and IT and the other Telstra functions, as well as between each individual line of business within Networks and IT itself. I’m hoping to set up the automation so that the team can use it for any type of cost, but my report today will be specifically for time-sheeted costs. 



I also need to insert these reports into the BPR pack, but I save this task for the latter half of the day.

12.00 PM

I go to the kitchen to microwave my food so that I can head out for lunch. The friends that I met in the Telstra Graduate Program always get together for lunch at QV on Tuesdays as we’re all in different functions and different buildings. Usually I’m the first one there, but the software engineering kids have beat me to it today!

1.00 PM

I’m back at my desk and my Principal, has asked me to isolate the budgets for vendor contracts on behalf of a partner that sits within the business. I prepare the outline so that I can directly pull data from our systems, but I send an email to the business partner to confirm from which perspective he wants the report.

Unfortunately he seems to be offline for the meantime, so I continue with my other tasks.

2.00 PM

I have a meeting in half an hour to discuss the profit and loss (P&L) statement for the function’s consolidated perspective. I look at the current standing of the P&L and make notes on any irregularities that I want to discuss with my Principal and finance business partners.

3.30 PM

My friend “pings” me on the internal company messaging system for a quick tea break. Every floor in the corporate head office has a kitchen with fridges along with tea and coffee facilities.

There is a special floor in the building that has an “on-tap coffee machine” that gives you coffee through a tap – yes, a literal tap – after you input your order into a tablet.

3.45 PM

I head back to my desk and complete the last of my report automation that I started earlier today. Due to the multiple lines of business and the specialised nature of the report, the automation part has taken me longer than I planned for.

I message my team and let everyone know that I will have the completed reports inserted in the pack by post close of business today.

4.45 PM

Report automation has been complete, and I get started on transferring the data into the pack. It looks like I’ll be done right before COB!

5.20 PM

I haven’t received confirmation from the business partner regarding the budget isolation report’s perspective and looking at my calendar, I have a pretty busy day tomorrow.



I start work on pulling data from the function’s perspective as well as for each line of business. Because I had prepared the outlines earlier, it won’t take me long to complete and tomorrow is free for me to focus on what is scheduled.  

5.45 PM

I pack up for the day and walk towards Flinders St Station. My friend showed me a funky album over the weekend; in go the headphones.

7.30 PM

I arrive home in time for dinner with my family. My siblings and I wash the dishes, and my sister happily chats away about balancing equations or something… I never had a knack for chemistry.

8.30 PM

I have a quick rinse, and my brother and I squeeze in a few episodes of a TV show (we’re currently re-watching Avatar: The Last Airbender). I also take some time out to journal about my day.

10.00 PM

It’s time for some shut eye! I wonder what tomorrow will be like.