Andersen Consulting had recently separated from Arthur Andersen upon my arrival in May of 1994, though we shared office space in Nations Bank Tower in downtown Dallas (the building with the green neon silhouette).

Andersen created “Management Consulting” and when their consulting practice began to out-perform the Audit and Tax practices in earnings, friction arose which eventually led to the separation of the two entities, though the government may also have played a role.

I had entertained going to work for AC for a couple of years prior and knew a few of the Dallas partners on a personal level, and when I produced the highest score to date on the AC technical aptitude test, they seemed relentless in their pursuit of my services.

I was hired on as a Senior Consulting Engineer in the Systems Resource Group (SRG), which was a new experiment for Andersen Consulting. AC had relied upon a system they called “pipeline”, which drew upon the talent of recent college graduates with high GPAs to be placed on projects with the intent of training them as well as making them billable. Certain situations called for specialized consulting to be brought in from the outside, hence, ACs decision to establish its own resource pool, SRG.