Voice of Experience: Isabelle Jenkins, Partner, Financial Services Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers

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By Elizabeth Harrin (London)

Isabelle Jenkins took a computerised careers test at university. The results told her to join the army or become a management consultant.

“In retrospect, management consultancy would have been a sensible choice,” she says, “but no one explained what it was. The job counselling I got at university was terrible.”

Today, Jenkins is a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the Financial Services Consulting business – not exactly where she thought she’d be when she was job hunting after graduation, but a job she loves. “When you peel them back, seventy per cent of consulting business problems involve technology,” she explains. “You need to have a technology focus to solve problems.”

It took her a while to find out that this type of problem solving was the business for her. Jenkins was an electrical engineering student at Imperial, and had spent her holidays working on placement in a factory making radar – an environment where she could use both her strong science skills and her desire to do something practical. Management consultancy didn’t seem to make any sense, so she took a position with Royal Bank of Scotland on their technical graduate trainee scheme.

“I worked in their technical group supporting the mainframe banking systems,” she says, “ and I learned a lot.” The downside of being excellent at her job was that RBS was reluctant to move her into a different department to broaden her experience. In the end, she started job hunting again.

“I saw an ad for an IT consultancy, and that looked terribly interesting,” Jenkins says. She has now been at PwC for 15 years, which is a long time for someone who initially thought she would stay for just two and then move back into banking. “The opportunities in PwC were so fantastic that I didn’t leave,” she explains.

A Massive Job: Untangling Lehman’s European IT Infrastructure

Consulting was a completely different environment to banking. Jenkins was able to work on a lot of projects where the learning curve was steep, so she soaked up information and was able to learn quickly, supported by a collaborative organisation. “One of the things that struck me was that knowledge was shared, unlike in my experience of banking,” she explains. “In PwC I was put on assignment and if I needed help, I would send out an email and would be overwhelmed with the offers of advice. The difference in culture blew me away. People wanted to work together and to share their knowledge.”

In her role as Partner, Jenkins leads the high profile effort to restructure Lehman’s IT systems after the business’ collapse in 2008. This is part of PwC’s role as administrators of Lehman’s European wing. “All the products are electronic at an investment bank,” she says. “We have to close out the trading positions and the turn that into cash for creditors.”

It’s a massive job. An international business like Lehman Brothers has a network of interrelated systems, and the IT system was global. “There were two thousand applications on seven thousand servers,” Jenkins says. “There was no rhyme or reason to where the applications were stored; they tended to be where the developers sat. We inherited spaghetti.” The first thing to do was secure the systems and get access to the relevant data required to wind down the operations. Transitional service agreements were put in place, providing a two-year window whereby everyone agreed to support the systems during the transition before they would be replaced. The project is still in its first year and Jenkins and her team have managed to complete an initial rationalisation exercise. “There was lots of business analysis required to decide which applications to switch off,” she says, “but we got down to 120 applications in four months.”

One of the challenges of working on a high profile initiative like this is justifying why things have to be done they way they are.

The Lehman’s project also requires investment in new infrastructure, and Jenkins says it can be hard to explain why that is, when PwC should be shutting services down. “Lehman’s is ten times as complicated as Enron,” Jenkins says. “We had to build a new data centre and a network.” The aim is to use that infrastructure to support just fifty applications by the time twelve months is up, and then twenty after that. She believes that she’ll be involved in winding up Lehman’s for several years to come, and says that she has a “personal responsibility” to see it through.

With such a massive project on the go, you’d be forgiven for thinking that is the focus of Jenkins’ time when she is at work. But she manages all that in half her working week, spending the rest of the time focusing on her other consulting clients – including another highly confidential, high profile and stressful project. “They are both fantastically interesting assignments,” she says, “and the people are absolutely excellent.”

A Very Good, Very Happy Balance

Jenkins speaks with a passion and commitment to her company and her team. It’s clear that she works very hard and pours a lot of energy into her clients. Amazingly, she does all that in a four-day week. Jenkins works part-time, and spends Fridays with her young family. “I’ve found a very good, very happy balance,” she says. “Because of the type of work we do in consulting, we can compartmentalise, and I see Fridays as another project. I know how much I can take on, and time at home is of equal priority to time at work.”

The women’s leadership programme at PwC is very supportive of flexible working, and Jenkins saw the company’s attitude to supporting working parents first hand when she returned to work. Initially she came back to three days a week, and then took this to four days a week, with a final view to moving back to full time working in due course.

However, her manager told her that he had informed HR she was on four days a week permanently. “He wanted it to be a conscious decision to change to full time working, not something I had to do because time was up,” Jenkins says, and she has found a work life balance that doesn’t require her to do a full working week – and she has still been promoted to Partner since then.

“Looking back, I did work long hours,” Jenkins explains, “and eventually I had to take up a hobby. It was all getting overwhelming and horse riding meant I had to the leave the office at a certain time and it’s a fantastic break and release. I think people get into a macho nature of long hours and become tired and unproductive. Of course there are times when you need to work late, but I encourage people to be more productive by stopping, going home and doing something else.”