09/30/2022
With offices and clients in different parts of the country, we were curious to hear what Senderoans in each of our markets love about working in different cities. We sat down with Kelsey Basler to hear more about her experience working in Phoenix.
Kelsey joined Sendero as an Associate in 2021. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma with degrees in Marketing and Psychology and has experience in the healthcare and manufacturing sectors.
Tell us about a typical week working from Phoenix.
The project I am staffed on is primarily remote, with various vendors and contractors from all over the world coming together to support an organization-wide system implementation effort. For key milestones throughout the project, we all travel to the corporate headquarters in Phoenix to collaborate in real time, conduct design sessions, and execute testing cycles more productively.
Monday
I start the week remotely from my apartment in Dallas. I serve as a project manager for several workstreams within this effort, so I spend the morning catching up on emails, updating the weekly status report, and looking over the agenda for the week. After huddling with my Sendero team, briefing the PMO team on the status of my workstreams, and leading my project team’s Daily Scrum, I grab a quick bite to eat and head to the airport.
After breezing through security, I find a quiet spot to take an internal meeting. Sendero supports the delivery and development of its consultants in many ways, including internal learning pathways and toolkits designed to highlight the various practice areas and service offerings that Sendero specializes in. Currently, I serve on an internal committee that is building out a learning pathway focused on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
Once everyone from the Sendero team makes it to Phoenix, we go out to dinner to bond as a group and enjoy the Phoenix food scene before the week gets busy. We have been able to try many different restaurants in Phoenix, but some of our favorites are The Mission, SumoMaya, and Chelsea’s Kitchen.
Tuesday
The team starts the day off bright and early, meeting in the hotel lobby and grabbing Starbucks for breakfast before carpooling to the client office to set up for the day.
The purpose of this specific trip is end-to-end testing of the software system the teams have spent the past few months designing and building. All of the IT teams, as well as key business users, are coming together in-person and virtually to ensure the system works as intended and call out any defects they notice.
It’s not all work and no play though. The client and team consistently prioritize coming together as a team and celebrating key milestones throughout the project. During our travel weeks, we often have project-wide dinners at local Phoenix hotspots. Tonight’s destination is a trendy downtown Phoenix spot, The Arrogant Butcher, located near the Footprint Center.
These dinners give us a chance to interact in a more relaxed environment, not only with our Sendero team, but also with the vendors, contractors, and client stakeholders that we work with on a daily basis. We take our time enjoying food and drinks, sharing Phoenix restaurant recommendations, and discussing our favorite parts of our home cities. At this particular dinner, our program manager also surprised us with a karaoke setup. We round out the night laughing and blowing off steam as we watch our coworkers belt out timeless classics and current favorites.