Profile: Cyrus Cavina, The Faculty Management Consultants
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Number of years in role: 2 Cyrus is a management consultant specialising in procurement strategy, processes and people. Originally from the UK, Cyrus has been living in Australia for three years. He has just completed a Masters of Enterprise (Executive) at the University of Melbourne. |
What do you do?
The company I work for, The Faculty, consults to the procurement and strategic sourcing functions within our client organisations. Our role is to provide leading blue chip organisations in Australia with strategic procurement advice and solutions and to develop the role of the function within our client organisation to add real value.
My role is to lead and manage specific projects on behalf of The Faculty. I specialise in looking after the ‘people business’, where we look at skills assessments, training and professional development for our clients, an area that has become a greater focus for the profession in the last few years.
What results are expected in your position?
There are four key areas for my role.
One is doing chargeable business i.e. working on projects with clients, that forms the backbone of the business. Secondly and increasingly important is building and growing our business for the future. Generating strong relationships and demonstrating our capability in the market are all part of this.
Promoting the business through speaking engagements, conferences and the like are all important parts of growing the company’s brand. And then I manage my team and ensure that we manage our projects effectively and that the team are motivated and engaged in their work.
What has been your biggest career highlight to date?
Before joining The Faculty, I worked at BHP Billiton as project manager for the Western Mining integration. As one of the largest acquisitions in Australian corporate history, it was a high profile project and I was working with a lot of different stakeholders to ensure successful integration of the Western Mining corporate functions into BHP Billiton. The project was monitored at the very highest levels within BHP Billiton and there were significant time pressures so to complete the project in such a successful manner was very rewarding.
What is the best and worst thing about your job?
The best thing is that I get to work with a variety of different clients. We engage with different industries, cultures and organisations which is interesting and stimulating. There are new challenges with each project.
One of the most challenging things is when we know that we’ve got a good solution and an opportunity to help improve but then the client chooses not to use us or to delay a project. That’s disappointing.
Any tips on how to get and stay ahead?
One of the key things for us is that our clients expect us to have the answers so we need to do ongoing research and be up to date on the latest trends. We need to be one step ahead of our clients in terms of knowledge and information. In our industry, knowledge is power.
How do you encourage loyalty with your staff and clients?
With clients, you have to do a fantastic job and exceed their expectations. It’s all about building a good relationship but to do that you need to do a good job first.
With staff, it’s really about making sure you can provide them with interesting and varied work. You need to constantly challenge them to reach their full potential by allowing them to give their best to the workplace.
What do you think employees want from their employer?
Briefly, to be given good challenges and to be fairly rewarded for their work. That means, to come in and do an honest day’s work, to be challenged, to have variety and to be acknowledged for their contributions.
It is important to listen to employees and take their ideas on board – they in turn feel they have made a contribution to the business. They want to be able to reflect back and say ‘I did that’ or ‘I contributed to that’.
What does your company do for staff, that you feel is different from what other companies provide?
What we can do is give our employees exposure to high level, interesting projects. And, if they have good ideas and they can provide a strong business case for them, then we give people the opportunity to run with their ideas. So our employees get the chance to develop from a work perspective as we have a flexible workplace environment. This was not always the case in the much larger organisations where I previously worked.
What are the biggest human capital issues your industry is dealing with? …and what should be done about them?
We did some research a little while ago around attracting, retaining and developing talent in the procurement sector. It was evident to us that there was a shortage of talent around Australia in procurement.
We need procurement to be accepted as a career in itself. It’s slowly happening through industry bodies but we also need organisations to recognise the strategic function of procurement within a business.
The good thing about procurement is that it’s changed from being a transactional operation to a more strategic focus. This means that we need specific skill sets to achieve our goals. It also means that there are opportunities for organisations to seek skill sets from other disciplines, such as law and engineering, to add value to procurement.
