Business Consulting Internship at Ahold Delhaize
My internship with Ahold Delhaize started in the winter of 2016 while I was at home for winter break and continued in the summer of 2017 after spring semester ended. Ahold Delhaize is one of the largest grocery food retailers in the United States and the Netherlands. At Ahold Delhaize, I was an IT intern within the Finance Department. I focused mainly on internal business consulting relating to IT projects. As a business consultant, I would coordinate and run meetings with different people within the business and complete the necessary paperwork to get the projects started.
As a business consulting intern, I learned a lot of interpersonal skills and how to use my strengths on teams. This was the first time I worked in a large company with team members located all around the country and even in other parts of the world. I learned how to tailor my communication based on what members of the team I was talking to. For example, for a Chase Pay implementation project, I had to speak with the senior IT Finance portfolio manager who was most interested in the big picture details, like the amount of work required so that she could fill out her demand plan. When speaking to the domain architect, he was more interested in the details of the system and all the IT requirements.
I also learned a lot about budgeting for projects. I would have to estimate the amount of hours required to perform project tasks throughout the quarter. Every week, I would have to adjust the budget based on actual work hours and reallocate money based on the funds that were left. This task was often difficult because a lot of the employees wouldn’t have enough available work hours that was required of them, so I had to find a balance between what was needed and what was available.
Overall, interning here was a good experience because I was able to see how projects get accomplished in a real company setting. It was also beneficial to see what internal business consulting was like because it gave me a better feel for what career path I might go into.