11 years of work behind the Top Performer Award

What is the Top Performer Award?

Every year, T-Systems rewards colleagues showing outstanding performance with a special prize. They make up the Top Performer Club, and members of the club can participate in a foreign trip together during the summer. On 3 February, during the TSI Kick Off 2022 Awards Ceremony, this year’s winners were announced, including two of our colleagues.

Head of Team Orsolya Szalay is one of the new member of Top Performers. She was found worthy of the title because of her innovative idea, implementation of the SAP Academy. On this occasion, we interviewed Orsi.

Orsi joined the DT-ITS team in 2011, and over the past 11 years she has held different positions. She started as a Service Desk Agent and after learning about an increasing number of sections and roles she continued in the SAP Unit as Change & Incident Manager. Subsequently, she was appointed Operation Manager, and from here it was just one step to the position of team leader. This recent award is not only for the past year’s work but all the 11 years she has spent at DT-ITS.

Your career has been extremely spectacular and it is possible to trace your development from step to step. How did you get from Service Desk Agent to a Head of Team position?

Even as a Service Desk Agent I was open and interested, I wanted to learn about as many areas as possible and get insight into different processes. By doing this, I saw clearly where my career path was heading.

And this career path led to Incident & Change management. What do these areas deal with?

As Incident Manager, I was responsible for incident avoidance and for compliance with SLAs, KPIs. Processing of client requests belonged to my tasks as Change Manager, to ensure that the requested changes happened in time and to the expected quality.

Being an Operation Manager must have been a broader task than this, I suppose.

That’s right, because as an Operation Manager I was responsible for keeping contact with clients, coordination between teams working in different specialized areas, and I also participated in the optimalization and establishment of processes, indeed, I was responsible for budgets, too.

How different are things now that you are a manager?

I’m not saying that I have totally stepped out of the professional line but this position focuses much more on people management. As a manager, I consider it important to provide career pathways, development options for colleagues. Matters such as organizing professional courses and discovering different development and promotion possibilities are close to me, I like dealing with these areas.

You received this award for implementation of the SAP Academy. Where did the idea come from? 

Last year had many challenges for us, one of them being in the area of recruitment training. With regard to this, we were contacted and the main request was to build a centralized, 15-member SAP project team in Hungary with responsibility for the planning and execution of SAP projects of global clients at international level.

It was our experience on the market that it is very difficult to find properly trained and qualified professionals rapidly. But why should we source them from outside when there is an excellent opportunity for colleagues working within the operation to move up a level in-house? This is in effect where the idea of the SAP Academy came from.

What does the SAP Academy look like in practice?

The SAP Academy is extension training for colleagues with an IT background who do not yet have SAP skills. Those who are taken on to the course have to participate in the training provided by the company for one month, where they can test the knowledge they have gained in an educational environment from day to day. At the end of the course, there is an examination which, if the colleagues pass, they can start a career in one of our operational teams as an SAP Basis operator, naturally with the support of a mentor. This programme makes it possible for more experienced colleagues to receive more complex tasks, for example, they can participate in exciting project work as a member of our project team.

How many colleagues applied for extension training?

Last year we resolved the replacement of seven colleagues with new colleagues who had completed the SAP Academy. This means that these seven colleagues received an opportunity to move forward in their career.

What does this award mean for you?

I consider the fact that my work was worthy of being nominated as enormous recognition. The fact that I was one of the chosen colleagues is just the icing on the cake.

However, I reckon that the honour does not only fall to me because I received huge assistance in the project. Without the support of my team, my managers, the help of the BPO and Recruitment teams, all this could never have been realized to such a high standard.