Venn at Work: Kylie Jones, Integration Consultant

If you are Kylie, your day is full of taking new challenges head-on, building integrations, and collaborating with clients to provide the best possible solutions. Keep reading to find out how Kylie spends her time as an Integration Consultant at Venn.

Do you have any morning rituals before the start of the work day?

Just like at work, I appreciate having a structure when I wake up. I use an app called Routinist that helps me build upon my regular morning habits. It also helps me stay on track so I don’t spend too much time on one thing and then—boom—I’m late for work.

How do you start your work day?

Starting my day, I find it important to block out time for tasks and to organize them based on priority. I use an app called Obsidian to take notes, set up tasks for the day, and check things off once completed. Since the majority of my responsibilities are for billable projects, it’s important to organize my schedule so that I don’t spend too much time on one thing. Ensuring projects are delivered on time and within budget is an important part of being an Integration Consultant at Venn.

That said, I’m not alone in ensuring the work gets completed. I collaborate closely with others on the team every day—including other technical consultants and project managers. Knowing that others are relying on me, I find it beneficial to block time for tasks so I can be more specific on how long something will take until completion.

What's your typical day like as an Integration Consultant at Venn?

My day consists of working with the team and our clients with a generous mix of heads-down tasks. Right now, I’m on four projects, and when I’m not working on the integration, I have regular meetings with our clients. During these meetings, I demo the integration to collect feedback so I know what needs to be changed or improved upon.

For my heads-down tasks, I’m working on the build of the integration. I usually start by looking at the source system and the destination system. For example, in a situation where a client’s CRM is the source system and their accounting system is the destination system, the data might sync from Salesforce to Sage Intacct. When looking at the source system, I’ll take note of what fields need to be mapped to the destination system. One field in Salesforce could be “Opportunity,” and I would map that to a corresponding field such as “Sales Order” in Intacct.

What is your favorite part of the job?

“I really enjoy my job a lot. I like integrating things, but particularly, I enjoy coming across an interesting problem a client could be facing. I like the challenge of formulating a solution that might help in transferring data in a unique way.”

My desire to take difficult tasks head-on probably stems from my prior experience working in Excel spreadsheets. Though spreadsheets are more fragile than integrations, they have similar approaches in the way you build out the formulas. You have to consider all of the if/then situations, determine what data points should move from a source to a destination, and be able to manage errors when you run into them.

“Another challenge I enjoy is determining how automation can fit in with a client's current processes. There are typically processes that clients want to keep untouched, so it's my job to come up with a helpful solution that reflects an organization's unique use case.”

What is your favorite thing about working at Venn?

The work we get to do for clients is my favorite part of the job. I can tell how much value integration and automation can bring to other people’s work lives, and it’s rewarding to hear what specifically improved for them after deployment.

“A lot of the time, these solutions we work on are eliminating processes that could take entire days to complete manually—but now with automation, they can see data synced over between systems in a matter of minutes.”

I also just enjoy being on the team. We regularly break up our days with a fun activity or play a game as a team during “Roll Call” on Fridays. 

Kylie is a big fan of board games—especially when Team Venn gets together to play one! She often enjoys playing "Ark Nova" (shown above) with her friends.

What do you enjoy outside of work?

Outside of work, I enjoy finding new places to see in the city with friends, doing long and intense board games, and playing recreational softball. Most would think being a catcher is the easiest position to play, but I have been in some pretty heated games where I was able to help get someone out before they made it to home base.

One thing I used to do pretty regularly and would love to get back into is hiking and camping. Not like the typical camping you did as a kid, but like the week-long journey through the mountains or woods kind of camping.

Kylie loves hiking and camping. The biggest camping trip she's done was a week-long journey through a reservation in Wyoming.

My biggest camping trip so far was to a preserved wilderness area in Wyoming. Vehicles were extremely limited there, so a lot of the trip was done by foot. The entire journey, we didn’t see a single person—which was nice but kind of scary when you feel cut off from civilization.

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