2012
Internship report Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
Summary FIRST PART: THALES COMPANY - PROBASIS ........................................ 1 1
THALES ............................................................................................................. 2
2
PROBASIS ......................................................................................................... 4
3
PROBASIS CENTRAL TEAM ............................................................................... 7
4
WORKING FOR THALES .................................................................................... 8
SECOND PART: INTEGRATE IN A NEW PROJECT’S TEAM............... 12 CONTEXT .............................................................................................................. 13
THIRD PART: MANAGING A FULL PROJECT ......................................... 15 CONTEXT .............................................................................................................. 16
Internship Report
FIRST PART: THALES COMPANY - PROBASIS
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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1 THALES Thales is a global leader in critical information systems on the Aerospace, Space, Defence and Security markets. The organization of Thales in six divisions defined by their markets allows the Group to increase its proximity with its customers, combining efficiency and competitiveness, and give full play to cross-business synergies. Divisions indeed share a common technological base including information literacy, its real-time broadcast and the architecture of complex systems are major axes. They also take benefits from the large international presence of Thales over the world. Aerospace Thales provides aeronautical equipment for civil and military aircrafts, the mission electronics for combat aircrafts, and airborne surveillance and mission. Space Forefront actor in the spacial domain, Thales controls offers end to end, combining spacial and terrestrial technologies. Air Systems La division des Systèmes Aériens conçoit et fournit des solutions globales de sécurité aérienne qui apportent une réponse adaptée aux besoins des utilisateurs civils et militaires. Air Systems division designs and provides global solutions to aviation safety adapted to the needs of civil and military users. Land and Joint Systems Thales proposes to land forces a full range of high value-added solutions that responds to joint commitments and network operations. Naval The role of the shipbuilding industry is to provide Marines all means to carry out their actions, both military and civilian, aimed at securing air and sea space. Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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Security Solutions & Services Thales is positioning itself as the global leader in information systems for critical missions and services on safety and security markets. Other activities: Components and Subsystems Thales is a leading manufacturer of components and sub-systems to ensure power amplification and X-ray imaging at the heart of high-tech systems. After this brief presentation of Thales Group, the project which will interest us is Probasis.
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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2 PROBASIS Probasis is the transformation plan that Thales is implementing to ensure sustainable growth in the new world economic context. The Probasis plan is designed to improve the Group's performance and competitiveness by simplifying working methods, investing in key domains, taking steps to better meet our commitments and facilitating teamwork across the organisation.
Probasis is Thales way of staying ahead of the changes that are happening in its markets. The Probasis performance plan is vital for the Group for a number of reasons:
Because the environment is changing:
Defence spending by Western governments, Thales traditional customers, is falling in most cases.
The world is becoming more uncertain: new threats are emerging (asymmetrical conflicts, terrorism, cyberattacks, natural disasters, environmental catastrophes, etc.).
Because the customers are evolving:
R&D funding is declining
In defence, security and transportation, demand from emerging countries is growing
There is a growing need to support critical decisions as the environment becomes more complex, not only on the battlefield, but in major cities, critical infrastructure and large-scale information systems. Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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Because Thales is less profitable than its competitors:
Due to market pressure Thales needs to improve its competitive performance by 1 point every year.
Above all, it means it is not possible to achieve sustainable growth and maintain a capacity for innovation, which is Thales primary safeguard for the future.
THE GOAL: EMPOWER THALES' GROWTH Probasis has four major principles of action:
SIMPLIFY The way to operate to improve the performance
INVEST In the tools, skills and resources, Thales needs to grow its business profitably in France and internationally
IMPROVE The business processes by adopting Group best practices and benchmarking on a regular basis
SHARE MORE To support teamwork and improve the overall efficiency as a Group.
ACTION PLANS : 9 TRANSVERSE PROJECTS
ENGINEERING LEAN PURCHASE BIDS & PROJECTS SHARED SERVICES IS-IT CHORUS 2.0 EUREKA CRITIAL SKILLS MANAGEMENT
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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Probasis is a set of improvement initiatives, based around nine different projects, all of which are key to the company's ability to sustain and accelerate business growth. More than 700 actions have already been implemented across the Thales Group’s business activities in 25 countries (including France). The nine projects are as follows:
Engineering:
A complete review of Thales product policies to better meet the constantly growing demand for increasingly complex and integrated systems
Lean:
An ever more proactive approach to problem-solving by everyone, in order to improve operational performance, focusing first on production, in close cooperation with customers, and then on engineering.
Purchasing:
More than 300 people involved in over 1,800 actions in industrial and technical communities in every entity and country to rationalize, standardize and support innovation to drastically reduce supply chain costs.
Bids
and projects: Preventing cost overruns in project execution by identifying the main causes of non-quality costs (NQCs), and proposing solutions to help teams control them.
Shared
Services: Increase expertise and share talents for an optimum quality of service.
IS-IT: Investing in
infrastructure to address everyday difficulties and allow more effective communication and collaboration.
Chorus 2.0: Making everyone’s life in the Group simpler by transitioning, in just two years, from a reference system with 70,000 documents to a single Group-wide business process baseline with 7,000 documents, thanks to the involvement of over 1,500 people.
Eureka: Enabling all employees to submit their ideas for improvements in day-to-day operations. In 2011, more than 2,000 suggestions were submitted by 1,850 people.
HR: Identifying, leveraging and developing skills to get the right talents in the right place at the right time. Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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3 PROBASIS CENTRAL TEAM
Christophe BERNARDET Stagiaire
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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4 WORKING FOR THALES So now you just enter the working group which has an impact on the engineering part of the transformation plan of Thales. The team currently manages a maturity assessment skills project on Thales competence centers (sites owned by Thales engaged in R & D, production, integration and/or service). My mission had a direct impact on this assessment. This assessment is divided into four major steps: 1. Send / receive evaluation questionnaires 2. Application of a retrieval, grading model of the answers 3. Sending of the returns (PPT format) and roadmaps to the competence centers. 4. Global statistics on Thales Group. So you must attend the team at every step throughout the year (early November to early July). Step 1: Update the Excel table containing actors and competence centers that will receive the evaluation. Update many questions of in the questionnaire based on feedbacks from last year. After all these adjustments: you must perform the following of the sending and return of questionnaires into a spreadsheet. You monthly attend meetings in connection with this questionnaire and its evolution, but also for a status report on the progress of returns. Step 2: Once the number of returned questionnaires is considered sufficient, then you have to strip them to be able to apply a retrieval model of the answers. This model, in addition to do the extracting of the answers, it regroup them using the business lines to perform a very detailed notation. The model is developed and maintained by another person of the team so you do not have to worry about it. Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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Step 3: Your role during this step is to help people to prepare the results to be refunded. This consists for example in the creation and layout of multiple MS PowerPoint presentations. Information restored clarity, the visual of them, are essential components during an assessment such as this one. Step 4: This last step of competence centers maturity assessment is important and meticulous. Thanks to the multiple numbers reassembled and sended by each division of Thales, you have to give a hand to present the information in relevant aspects. Think on graphs, tables, maps and diagrams that are exposed to the group afterward. You'll see, follow the progress of this project is a very rewarding experience and time goes very fast, no time to get bored. In parallel, you also enter the PMO (Project Management Office) team of Probasis. The role of this team is first of all monitoring work (setting up reporting, application of a standardized methodology for projects ...). Personally, I gave a hand on several projects throughout my internship. Firstly, over a period of several weeks, I've set up a database for the head of Hardware and Industry in Thales. The aim was to gather information about a dozen Excel files sent by correspondents to create a single database on MS Access. Thereafter, I developed a tool (in Visual Basic) exploitable by the team manager, ranging retrieve filtered information in the database. I presented this tool around half of my internship period; it is now deployed over the Thales Hardware corresponding. Also, I regularly dedicated my time to the Communication and Change responsible. Initially, my mission was to develop a tool for sending mails automatically. It would be used at each end of the month to transfer the different dashboards of the project called Eureka. The correspondents were thirty, the tool had to gather information from multiple Excel spreadsheets and then make a PDF. This PDF was sent to the already selected corresponding by mail, automatically written in the language of the recipient according to its country of residence.
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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The best involvement that I have had in the Eureka project was the administration of the database site. I put weekly updates with information related to ideas based on the demands of Eureka contacts.
Here are the main user requests: • The person who created an idea form has changed of manager • The status of an idea form is too advanced, not allowing back ('Closed' or 'Implemented') • The title of the card must be slightly modified • The name of the (potential) co-authors must be modified (for example remove duplicates) • A card in draft mode and finalized by a person by mistake should be deleted
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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No tool was actually developed about it, so I had to use phpMyAdmin to manage the database.
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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SECOND PART: INTEGRATE IN A NEW PROJECT’S TEAM
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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CONTEXT In this second part, I have to convince my internship supervisor to let me enter a working group for a new project around Probasis. The way to make this document realistic and professional I have chosen is the email format. It is addressed to my supervisor, Hervé Jarry.
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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THIRD PART: MANAGING A FULL PROJECT
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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CONTEXT I will write a motivation letter in this third and last part. The letter will serve to convince the project manager of Thales Probasis entrust me with the task of project manager up to manage customers. I will describe my professionnal carreer from the beginning to explain my choices in the aim to become that Thales project manager.
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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Christophe Bernardet 9, rue Boursier 91400 Orsay
Phone : +336 31 45 10 78 Mail :
[email protected]
45, rue de Villiers 92200 Neuilly-sur-Seine
Orsay, Monday 27th July 2012
Monsieur,
Finishing a end of studies internship for the Epitech school (School of computer science and technology), my career took me to Thales in January 2012. Let me express my strong interest in your business from the beginning. So I write this letter in order to express the immense satisfaction that It would be for me to obtain a position in your company with higher responsibilities, at the end of my internship. Complete a project as a project manager from one end to the other, take care of customer relationships and take all the responsibilities would be for me a great honor and a real boost in my career. Through my training, I gained solid bases, both theoretical and practical that have been essential during my several internships in companies. Various missions were entrusted to me: develop within the Department of Information Systems NRJ Group, assist the Head of International Relations Office of the Epitech School for over a year. In parallel, I joined a student working group on a project that challenges digital identity theft, particularly at the level of authentication. This innovative project was part of my studies at the Epitech and held my last two years of study. Finally, I am currently completing my internship at Thales, the team Probasis, which you are responsible. Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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During this experience, I have been able to use both my computer skills and my relational side on team works. I'm very open-minded, to the listening and always happy to help the others. I spent much of my time answering computer science oriented questions and used to develop small programs to simplify my colleagues’ life. I would therefore like to put this experience by attending a team at all levels to advance a project that I have the complete responsibility. I also gained a good quality in writing and developed a spirit synthesis. So many times, I had to make presentations of ongoing projects and the work done to my team. Now, it is so much easier to express myself in community, an essential quality when you become a project manager. It is with pleasure that I would orally present the details of my previous experiences and expose my motives. In the meantime, please accept, Sir, the assurance of my consideration.
Best Regards,
Christophe Bernardet
Christophe Bernardet Bernar_c
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