Internship Raport
Internship Raport
Nicolas ZERR
27/02/2012 - 31/07/2012
Login: nzerr_ext
1
Internship Experience Report
TABLE OF CONTENT
TABLE OF CONTENT ............................................................................................ 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................ 5
INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 6
I. SQUARE-IT ................................................................................................... 7
1. RESULTS ......................................................................................................32
Project tasks states ........................................................................................32
Results analysis in term of money ....................................................................32
Results analysis in term of organization benefits.................................................32
2. PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROJECT ..............................................................33
Fix bugs from Pixel migration process failures ....................................................33
Implied in user profile management with Lync ...................................................33
User usage of SharePoint improvement .............................................................33
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 42
References ....................................................................................................43
Books ...........................................................................................................43
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Since I have worked for Square-IT, but have been in mission in Rexel, I would
like to express my gratitude to people from the two organizations.
I would also thank M. Cyril SAYAG, Square-IT salesman and having being in
mission in Rexel, for his precious advice and for his care towards me.
First, I would like to thank Mr. Arnaud HAMEL for being my mentor, for his will to
help, for his professionalism and his daily good mood and sense of humor.
I would like to thank Nicole LE RAY, who relieved Mr. HAMEL in charge of the
Pixel project, for her professionalism, her seriousness and her pertinent remarks
about managing the project.
And finally, thank the whole IT department team for their good mood and their
remarkable collaboration.
INTRODUCTION
The mission subject is the evolution and maintaining of the REXEL France
collaborative intranet. In short, it consists in programming new features for the
Intranet, based on the SharePoint 2007 / 2010 technology, and also to maintain
previous projects, made by other interns or external service provider. The other
facet of the job is to handle business users’ requests, such as site creation,
permissions, new project definition, etc.
In order for the reader to perceive the actual context of this internship, the first
part describes in brief the company Square-IT, and also useful notes about the
subject of the intern.
Then, the document is divided into three sections, each describing a context in
the business world.
The first part describes how to explain the company context, the project context
to a new intern, who is in charge of continuing the project.
The second part is intended to the internship responsible. In this scenario, the
responsible must be convinced to engage the intern in a new project by
analyzing the ending project review.
The last part is dedicated to the scenario where the intern must convince an
executive chief or a high ranked employee to allow him to take the responsibility
of a new project, from the beginning to the end.
I. SQUARE-IT
Its location, Asnières sur Seine, near Paris, earns the benefit to be
near most of the business headquarters. Square-IT and provides
services for many partners and co-workers, such as Veolia, Rexel…
For Epitech’s fifth year, many students chose to go to Epitech Paris to study. It
was allowed and recommended to get a part-time job, so that the second part of
the week was dedicated to Epitech classes and the first part was intended to
have a job experience in a company in alternation.
For six months, I have worked for Square-IT in alternation in the Rexel
Company. The alternation period was followed directly by the internship. At the
beginning, I did not expect to continue in Rexel for the internship, but the
professional structure and the job were interesting and I have learnt a lot during
the alternation. I decided to sign for another contract and make my internship
there, for six months again.
I was under the responsibility of Arnaud HAMEL, project leader, and later Nicole
LE RAY.
The following scenario puts the student in the classic situation where he finishes
his mission and must transfer the competence to another person in charge of the
project. In this part, we will focus on what is interesting the other person to
quickly learn about the company and the new project:
Rexel Group
Its strategy consists in associate leadership and proximity, both for private
individuals and companies.
Highlighting figures:
37 countries
2 100 agencies
130 logistical centers
28 000 employees
Results
Sales: €12.7 billion
Marge: 24.6%
Net result: €319 million
Geographical structure
Structural organization
Executive committee
Rexel has developed a big partnership with more than 30 providers, the principal
ones are:
- Schneider
- Siemens
- Bosch
- Osram
Rexel is the leader in electric supply in Northern and Southern America, first in
Asia and second in Europe. Its main competitors are Legrand and Hager.
IT department
- Square-IT
- IBM
- Logica
- Steria
- Microsoft
- Expertime
Company goals
Concerning the company business, the main goal is to reinforce its leadership, by
improving the proximity towards its customers, and consequently increase the
number of agencies.
Rexel also wishes to improve service and information quality for both customers
and collaborators. Consequently, the company relies on technologies evolution
and IT processes.
Strategy:
Rexel has a strategy plan called Energy in Motion, which focuses four strategic
points:
Company growth
The firm also establishes relations with other leading companies: thanks to a
consequent number of contracts with partners and services providers, Rexel
keeps its IT up to date continuously, often taking advantage of the latest
products on the market with reduced costs.
Communication
One of Rexel’s biggest problematic of is how to keep aware each business agent
of new information, and vice-versa:
- For service providers, define interfaces for updating and upgrading data
applications
- For organization units, communicate between them internally and notice
collaborators of changes and evolutions.
- For employees, allow to share new content and resources
To solve this issue, the data management is centralized to one endpoint: Pixel,
the collaborative Intranet, with the assets of data scalability, maintainability and
spreading for all collaborators.
Collaboration
- Share documents
- Manage events
- Feed business data
- Send and receive alerts
- Workflows
However, SharePoint itself was not responding to all Rexel's needs: because
structure and data are specific and potentially complex, the platform has to be
adapted and extended. This is the project Pixel.
Key values
Rexel has developed six key values they are interacting with their customers:
1. Job description
The job exists since 2008. At this period, the Pixel project was created. The job
has been taken over from several people.
Subject
Main goal:
The main goal is to develop new features for Pixel. Pixel is a generic tool for
collaboration. However many collaborators have specific needs: personal data
management, production control, document management, or needs for an
application dedicated to a business job.
The job precisely consists in conceiving, developing, testing and integrating the
new functionalities.
Implicit missions
In addition of the main goals, peripheral tasks are involved for the project’s
sake:
Rexel has a close partnership with Microsoft; the software stack is mostly based
on its technologies, for end users as well as the general infrastructure.
Personal environment
Qualification environment
Production environment
In order to limit bugs between the testing phase and the deployment phase, the
production environment and the qualification environment are the same,
excepted that production environment does not contain any programming tool.
The physical maintenance of the machines on which Pixel is running is not part of
the job. However, if a server breakdown occurs, it is the role of the Pixel’s
developer to alert the infrastructure maintenance team.
Pixel is Rexel France‘s collaborative Intranet. Its main goal is to share data
across users, organizations units, but also partners and external suppliers.
This data is generally under the form of documents, or data lists. Users can
access this data, depending on their authorizations and scope of action.
- Business intelligence :
o Statistics
o Reporting and logging
o Process definition
- Available for all : pixel is an online tool, available from every computing
device
- Improved maintenance : Pixel does not require any installation, and is
automatically updated in live
- Direct access to data: one can easily request data access
- Interaction with other programs : other applications can get or set data
- User friendly interface: better understanding for users.
User scope
- People: Pixel is a centralized solution, hosted on one single place, but used
through all the country by all organization units. Actually, this Intranet is
not only limited to Rexel employees, but also destined for services
providers. In this way, sharing files between organizations becomes
easier, but it requires a strict security policy. The goal is to prevent users
to access private or meaningless data for their usage.
2. Project Tasks
The most frequent task is to attribute properly user rights. Often, the request
consists in a ticket creation, a mail from the helpdesk or a request from a
manager.
Rexel has an increasing amount of collaborators, and they need more and more
to access data.
Although frequent, this task is not always easy : most of the time, it consists just
in granting an access to a web site or a data list, but it is also possible to grant
access in a very granular manner, file by file.
Moreover, rights can have more complexity than just give read or write access:
for instance, users should only have access to their entries, or should create but
not delete.
In general, user authorizations are not given individually, but users are put into
groups having different level of rights. Managing rights by group provides more
flexibility and convenience. In addition, Pixel is synchronized with Active
Directory (software referencing organizations units, people, computers, etc.),
which is the reference for people management. It is mandatory to consult it
before attributing rights, in order to preserve the same logic in both applications.
As we see, despite the fact attributing permissions is technically easy and does
not take much time, it has to be done with consciousness.
Website creation
Pixel is a web platform, and the intranet can be considered as a hierarchical site
collection: each site can have many sub-sites, repeated for many levels. It uses
Microsoft SharePoint site creation mechanism, which facilitates the process of
creating site structure. Site creation implies
In this task, the most important is to understand what the user really asks for,
and imagine the result he expects. The fact is that the majority of users are non-
initiated and not conscious of the possibilities and limits of creation of website in
SharePoint. Realizing exactly what they want can take much time: the goal is to
make a compromise of what they want and what can be quickly deployed.
Rexel France, due to his national reputation, has to handle key accounts, in other
words, important customers. These accounts can be hospitals, hotels, prisons,
towers, stadiums, etc. Indeed, Rexel provides batches of electrical supply for the
construction sites.
The data was stored in an Access database. But managing the information about
these construction sites has become quirky, and had to be updated by more and
more people. The access database was not adapted for this purpose: sharing the
data with the construction sites team.
Therefore, a project has been initiated on SharePoint 2007: the goal was to
extract the data, and make a convenient user interface.
- Manage data about the construction sites (generic information such as the
place, the type of the contract, the state of the contract, the customer
data, etc.)
- Manage batches: a batch is an ensemble of electric supply material, such
as high current / low current. Each batch has its owner, its cost, etc.
- Manage contacts: a contact is a person or other organization who signed
the contract of batches with Rexel.
- Manage companies groups: often, the customers or competitors are
company groups, and Rexel wants to collect and keep non sensitive data
about these companies.
The goal was to provide a database on earned markets to log the amounts or, in
case the contract could not be signed, keep a track of the reasons of the failure
(offer too high, competitor partnership, etc.). The main purpose of this project is
the ability to extract useful statistics to analyze Rexel‘s weaknesses in the
process of acquiring the governmental contracts.
The project has been started before the internship, but needed to be updated. In
fact, the governmental contract data is provided by the regional administrative
assistants. The problem stated was the data was not uniform, and even
contained mistakes due to the lack of control. Moreover, the database did not
take into account the contracts lifecycle (creation date, expiration date, ending
notification date, etc.)
The evolution allowed to impact more people: not only the assistant is implied in
the data processing: the sales manager, the agency director and the salesmen
are informed of the governmental contracts lifecycle.
Pixel maintenance
Although Pixel must be accessed all the time, incidents can happen: server
crashes, http server failure, or bug following a user unusual action. The job here
is to check the environment status by analyzing logs.
This kind of problem can be difficult to handle, because it has a big impact on
user’s work: they cannot access their documents or information. Pixel main
priority is to be available, so the responsible has to quickly react after the failure:
the qualities required for this task are swiftness, methodology and be prepared
to face this kind of situation.
- Alerting tool, more versatile than the SharePoint built-in alerting system
- Web Parts (web page components) to automate data importation into Pixel
data lists.
- Automatic transfer of file to a UNC path (not out of the box with
SharePoint)
This subproject has begun with a user form to handle requests for hardware and
software for a user‘s workstation.
The main goal is to create modern and reliable forms, and to send forms data to
the request handler entity (support, IT direction, etc.):
Other projects of forms to automate the processes were born following the
success of the deployment of these forms.
The result of that is a better collaboration of users, and allows making statistics.
The next step is to go further and use the collected statistics to improve user
experience and support efficiency by sibling more precisely user requests.
As in each project, documentation has been produced. It is the role of the intern
to produce documents about the new features, but also operating user guides,
specifications, etc. For each part of the project, documentation has been written,
and already existing documentation has to be modified. Documentation is one of
the prior tasks, because it facilitates communication between the project owner,
the intern and the next persons who will be in charge of the project.
In this scenario, the intern must show to his mentor he can take the
responsibilities of a new project. We can assume that the mentor will look
- On the progress made: are the technical and soft skills sufficient?
- The project results: has the intern been able to meet the project
requirements?
- How the project was managed: what were the keys of the success and
efficiency in the project tasks management?
I. PROGRESS MADE
1. Technical skills
Although SharePoint has its own features and software design, the technologies
used are widely spread and used in other contexts, especially Microsoft ones. In
that case, this experience gives the ability to have a good opinion during decision
meetings.
Programming languages
Web Technologies
Software
- DotNet Framework :
- LINQ : Language INtegrated Query, used in combination with C# to
perform content queries
CAML: markup language for queries
- Web services
- SOAP / REST : protocols based on XML, often used in a remote procedure
call architecture
2. Soft skills
Relationship with colleagues and hierarchy is the key of success in managing
people resources. During the internship, I have been able to collaborate with a
large amount of persons.
I have identified each employee’s role, and am able to redirect people requests
to the right person.
Knowledge of processes and rules has also been developed: the ability to inform
people whether they are respecting the processes and if not, explain them how
to do and who to contact.
1. Working methods
Meetings
Working method
The following method I applied to the main project tasks is the following
schedule:
Using this method of work allowed me to have a better management of the time
because I was able to situate the project advancement. It is also a better way to
communicate the progress of the project to the customers and managers, and
reassure them about the schedule and the respect of the deadline.
The first step in the internship was to read books about SharePoint, in order to
better understand the Pixel working.
Pixel is an IT project, and nowadays many users get help from the Internet more
and more. I have developed efficient research skills during my internship, and for
every problem, I could find a solution or a hint by help from Internet.
I could also benefit of Rexel’s partnership with Microsoft and Expertime to get
help and documentation about the Microsoft environment.
2. Project quality
I have put an emphasis on acquiring the best programming techniques, and use
the most recent technologies. The objective was to produce applications more
flexible, scalable, and efficient. I also focused on bug tracking, to reduce
maintainability costs.
1. Results
Since Pixel is a project constantly evolving and with a promising future, and
because of the number of possibilities of improve functionalities, we cannot
speak about finishing the Pixel project. However, all the tasks tracked during the
six months in the request tool were successfully implemented.
At the end of the internship, the following features have been integrated in the
production environment and are subsequently finished:
The website automatic creation feature is still in development. The fact this task
is not terminated is mainly because of two aspects:
- Microsoft, the editor of SharePoint has limited technology choices for his
cloud version, yet the project had to be compatible with the cloud.
Fortunately, I have been able to reduce technologies dependencies, and
keep the functionalities fully unmodified.
- The project schedule and owner have changed during the conception
phase: I have inherited of this subproject, initially intend to be developed
by an external team, therefore the planning has changed.
- Mastered processes
- Time gained
- The generic alert application could be reused for other projects
- The evolved form project gave birth to other similar projects, such as
application authorization requests.
The Lync software is an instant messaging tool which allows searching people by
skills. Indirectly concerning Pixel project, I have been interested in this project
and participated to Lync integration in the environment, by meeting Microsoft
technical experts.
When making a project, I have based the strategy on focusing user needs:
understand people interaction, preferences and feedback allowed me to modify
the environment to provide a better collaboration between people, and more
efficiency of data feeding by the overall users.
First, that the company background has been understood: the corporation
knowledge, its goals, and its culture.
Second, show that he has natural or learnt management skills that can be reused
for the leadership of a new project.
Third, that interest is shown for the project, by explaining the personal intentions
for the new project, in which way the project will be managed and what will
make the difference compared to another person.
I. COMPANY KNOWLEDGE
Contacts and interlocutors: Knowing the right person for the right question
During the internship, I have dealt with many collaborators: working on the core
of the communication tools implies a continuous flow of user requests for content
change. Since Pixel applies to different domains, the first task was to identify the
user's role in the company, in order to have a better idea of their needs.
Consequently, I have been able to build up a set of contacts for each field of
application. Also, because Pixel is the central point for data access and I have
been in charge of granting access to users, I got a good overview of the
company hierarchy, essentially by analyzing the people groups.
As in every domain, IT has its own vocabulary that has to be mastered to fully
understand needs and requests. In fact, I have done an effort on understanding
the meaning of enterprise notions:
Enterprise notions
A good manager has to understand how what makes his company unique. In
order to understand Rexel’s specificities, I have taken time to read
documentation, at the beginning of the internship, about the following subjects:
- product names
- jobs
- Projects
- Technical words
- Business world
- Project descriptions
- Ways projects are documented
- People organization.
In Rexel‘s case, the company mission is clearly to provide quality products and to
promote customer satisfaction. Employees are expected to provide quality
service, respect quality standards and above all meet customers and users need.
increase company profit margins: Rexel tries to reduce its production costs
Diversify services: especially in IT, Rexel offers services to their customers and
their users, to answer for more and more specific needs
Short-term goals
Use the newest technologies: For instance, the use of the latest versions of
SharePoint and JIRA is a proof that Rexel IT department tries to always provide
the latest features to the collaborators.
Being a manager requires to have an overview of the project technically, but also
strategically: the manager has to think beyond the project, for the whole
enterprise. Understand the company goals in a larger scope helps in taking
decisions to ensure that a project takes the good direction. More than that, a
project fully compliant with the overall strategy ideas can become a model, and
other company projects can get inspired and follow the example.
All along my internship, I got an interest in the company culture. I could observe
way people act (both on and off the job), present themselves, how they work. I
also observed the way workers interact with each other’s, with supervisors and
across the departments.
Being a team leader, I would pay a particular attention on respect the ethics and
the company culture, not only to have a good image in the company but also for
users.
I applied the essential keys of succeeding in being an integrated employee.
The result of this experience is that I gained confidence with my co-workers, and
that they were even asking for advice on several subjects.
Although my role was not really being a project leader, I got a certain freedom in
managing Pixel project tasks and tracking.
Observing continuously managers, I have been able to discern what their role is
and which tasks they should accomplish.
During the internship, I have observed how my advisors were handling their
project, but have also been pro-active by organizing meetings, creating tasks
and solving problems.
Employees just tell the fact as they are: honest and open communication
promotes better cooperation. For technicians, it allows them to better admit their
error, and for managers have a better idea of the project situation.
I also have mastered IT communication tools. Mail, telephony, tracking tools, but
also instant messaging used efficiently depending on the context can be a great
time saver and facilitates communication.
As the Pixel project main actor, I have noticed ways of improving the users and
collaborator work, not on a technical aspect but rather on a business or moral
problematic. I have identified three points I would focus as a project manager:
process automation, zoom in user needs, and reinforce collaboration by sharing
knowledge.
1. Process automation
Many processes are nowadays still handmade or only semi-automatic. During my
work, I have pointed on several aspects that could be made by a computer,
especially all user requests and workflows.
Automation simplifies the process: for instance, once a form was completed,
there was a chain of people to validate the process, and a long time can occur to
pass data from a user to another. It is a gain of time and simplicity: for people in
charge of the requests, they just have to focus on the content (the request
resolution) and not the form, which is standardized. For users that initiate the
request, rather than spend time on formatting and understanding the processes,
automation can help them to focus on the request elaboration.
Automation also gives a better control of the data passing through users and
applications. Because every request is recorded, it becomes possible to make an
analysis of the collected data, and use this data to offer a better user experience.
To get closer from users’ needs, data must be collected on the usage of their
application, on the difficulties they meet, and analyze all the use cases.
User opinion is also a great factor in a manager’s decision: if not fitting with the
users requirements, the consequences can be a reject of the user and a drop in
user motivation of using his unsuitable tools.
Therefore, in the new project, I would perform user surveys, to compare their
feedback with the steering committee decision. If both merge, the project has
great chance to be a success.
Team synchronization is the key for a successful project. However, it is often the
case where employee’s schedules do not fit with each other’s. Synchronization
requires time, therefore money. Improving the efficiency of meetings is a
performance key, and this can be achieved by letting people access and produce
all enterprise knowledge and inform them on the fly: nowadays a “tweet” can
have more impact than a heavy document.
To conclude, although this does not only apply to a specific project, I really think
improve employees work efficiency and comfort is maybe the main role of the
manager, and would be one of the main aspects I would focus on.
CONCLUSION
During these six months, many tasks have been done, and often their impact
and results were reported: users and managers expressed their feedback and
satisfaction: this is a mark of gratitude, and proves that I have followed the
same strategy than the IT department: continuously improve services quality
and availability.
I did not expect to deal with so many kinds of jobs, and even learn about new
ones in the domain of IT. I also dealt with other business units collaborators
directly, and quickly developed teamwork skills with them. Although I was a
service provider employee, I felt integrated to the company: I was in charge of
my project, and had a centric role in the company.
Rexel France headquarters is a suitable place for a third cycle study experience,
because of its size, its dynamics and its skilled people. Even if the internship
subject does not require guru technical competences, it is a great chance to
develop its soft skills and project management skills.
I have an excellent feedback on the job and the company: the working conditions
are pleasant; people are open minded and very professional. It constitutes an
interesting, enhancive and rich experience I can add to my bag, as well for skills
as contacts.
To conclude, I can say this experience was a success both for Square-IT and me:
at the end of the internship, I have been hired in Square-IT with a long term
contract: I will still work for Rexel for a certain amount of time, and then
integrate a new greater project, and apply all I learnt during the 5th year
internship to it.
References
http://www.rexel.com
http://www.rexel.fr/
http://support.microsoft.com/?ln=fr
http://www.codeplex.com/
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/fr-fr/Pages/default.aspx
http://office.microsoft.com/fr-fr/sharepoint-server-help/composant-webpart-
image-HA010024051.aspx
Books