Meet Michaél, a Melbourne based Senior Consultant in our Cloud and Engineering Advisory team, which is part of the Core Business Operations practice in our Consulting Business Unit. He is passionate about partnering with clients to realise the business value of cloud transformation.

So, tell us about a day in the life …

I try to start my day off by waking up early and going to the gym (or if I’m working from home, I’ll take advantage of Deloitte Flex to go at lunchtime). After a brief glance at my calendar to plan the day ahead, I usually attend any project or team stand-ups in the morning and try to complete more focused work on deliverables in the afternoon.

My recent projects have focused on cloud and infrastructure modernisation strategies for both the banking and mining sectors, however I am currently on a secondment working within the online platform delivery team for a large retail organisation.

Outside of project work, I enjoy getting involved in the many non-project related activities available at Deloitte. Within our Engineering and Advisory team, I assist with the ongoing licensing support of some of our Digital Workplace clients, and we have periodical calls to discuss some of the challenges they face and how best to tackle them. Outside of that, I enjoy planning team events for our Melbourne team and am also a member of the Melbourne Steering Co for Deloitte’s LGBTI Network, StandOUT.

If I’m going into the office, I try to make time for one-on-one or team-wide catchups with my peers and coaches. Informal conversations about upcoming engagement opportunities within our team have been the source of some of my most interesting project experiences, so I really value these catchups.Depending on the night of the week, I like to make dinner for myself and my housemates at home and end the day with our favourite TV show – we’ve just started watching the Game of Thrones prequel on HBO.

From your perspective, how does Cloud help our clients unlock business benefits?

Cloud can be such a powerful tool for business stakeholders within an organisation to achieve their strategic goals. Often, we hear from clients that they embark on a journey to the cloud to achieve commonly understood benefits like scalability, reliability, security and cost optimisation. A particularly interesting challenge many have faced, however, is articulating how these benefits are measured and realised.

My most recent project was for a large mining company which had begun an organisation-wide Cloud Migration Program. After the closure of a data centre, they identified a need to better quantify the business benefits of the work they were performing. We were able to work with the program manager to align technical cloud features to more widely understood business benefits in terms the non-technical business executive stakeholders were able to understand.

Using this framework, we developed a financial model which quantified these business benefits over the duration of the migration. Ultimately, our main (technology) stakeholder was thrilled with the outcome as it empowered him in conversations with the business and justified continued investment in the program.