“If you want to change something, you have to be a part of it,” – this seems to be at the core of everything Ishtiaq does.
Back in school, when he was in the 8th grade, he had a prefect who often gave everyone unfair red cards and bad remarks in their diaries. Frustrated with this behaviour, a young Ishtiaq decided to take matters in his own hands and stand for the prefect elections the following year. Not only did he win the elections, but also became a fair and good prefect for his classmates.
As a Senior Analyst, in the Data Analytics team, Ishtiaq continues to be the change he wants to see. He recently took an initiative to automate a process that took a lot of time and manual effort. He was working on creating presentations for clients every month, from a host of 2900 data files that were stored in an excel format. Not only was this process tedious because of large data files that took forever to download, but it was also an extremely lengthy process that took about 40 hours of his time every month. “We needed to move to a better tool that would decrease the manual effort and increase the scope of the work we were doing.” And so, Ishtiaq set out on a mission to automate this process.
After a few months of assessing which tool would be best in order to reduce the amount of time significantly and that would also be easy to maintain, he and his team have successfully automated the entire process. As compared to the 40 hours it took initially, it now takes only 45 mins to create those 2900 files, out of which the person doing the process is only working actively for about 10 mins.
“With automation, my goal is always to create a process that is not person-dependent. The idea is that anyone should be able to do the process end-to-end, in the least amount of time.”
Ishtiaq’s willingness to take this initiative is inspiring and has opened new avenues for automation across teams at Rayden.
Indeed, a true example of catalyst behaviour!
