Christmas 2007
HBOS now want me to stay on until the end of July 2008. This time, they want another warehouse built. This one is for the Irish based operation. It is to be built using the first warehouse as a model, but wherever necessary improved. I accept. Too good an opportunity to design a warehouse from scratch.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
HBOS General Insurance
In early July 2007, having spent a few weeks (gardening, as well as chasing the ever disappearing contracts) at home, I got a call from Chris Parker at Pathway - he had a contract for HBOS in Leeds (oh, not Leeds again). They had three weeks work to do. So I said yes. The money would help to pay the never ending bills.
Within a week, HBOS decided that they really needed me for another six months, having discovered that the work for the Competition Commission investigation into PPI was not as simple as had first been envisaged. I looked at the market in the North West and decided that Leeds was better than nothing at all.
The work on the Competition Commission investigation went on until the end of October, and HBOS decided that they needed to keep me busy on another project that had been put on ice while the PPI work was going on. This was a proper warehouse build project. So I accepted another six month extension, learning that I was needed to do another warehouse project based (loosely) on the first one, this time for the Irish operation.
This project was to be a much better one than the first one. I had a chance to do the design work and the build using the techniques that I had learned were the best over many years of building management information systems.
Within a week, HBOS decided that they really needed me for another six months, having discovered that the work for the Competition Commission investigation into PPI was not as simple as had first been envisaged. I looked at the market in the North West and decided that Leeds was better than nothing at all.
The work on the Competition Commission investigation went on until the end of October, and HBOS decided that they needed to keep me busy on another project that had been put on ice while the PPI work was going on. This was a proper warehouse build project. So I accepted another six month extension, learning that I was needed to do another warehouse project based (loosely) on the first one, this time for the Irish operation.
This project was to be a much better one than the first one. I had a chance to do the design work and the build using the techniques that I had learned were the best over many years of building management information systems.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Resolution Life
Following a successful three months in Edinburgh, I had almost a month off, gardening and chasing agencies for work in the North West of England. Eventually, at the end of July, I landed one, in Liverpool, for a company called Resolution Life. This involved starting to develop a new data warehouse for the company's actuarial department. They wanted to be able to generate actuarial reporting using a standard source of data for all of the multiple customer facing systems they had somehow acquired.
This work involved documenting their source systems so that we could decide what data we should be capturing for the new warehouse.
During the autumn, though, they decided that the Liverpool office would close and that the work I was doing should be transferred down to their Midlands base just south of Birmingham. I re-located down there during November 2006. This involved a weekly commute from Chester fighting the Birmingham crawl on the southbound M6 every Monday morning - It took almost as long to get to Wythall Green from J12 of the M6 as it took to get from Chester to J12, even though the distance was only about a third.
I then spent the next seven months helping the documentation of the warehouse systems, without getting my hands dirty on the new SAS tools (grhhh). I actually helped Phil (who I met at Standard Life) get a similar role at Resolution. He stayed on after I finished (in June 2007) eventually finishing up in June 2008.
This work involved documenting their source systems so that we could decide what data we should be capturing for the new warehouse.
During the autumn, though, they decided that the Liverpool office would close and that the work I was doing should be transferred down to their Midlands base just south of Birmingham. I re-located down there during November 2006. This involved a weekly commute from Chester fighting the Birmingham crawl on the southbound M6 every Monday morning - It took almost as long to get to Wythall Green from J12 of the M6 as it took to get from Chester to J12, even though the distance was only about a third.
I then spent the next seven months helping the documentation of the warehouse systems, without getting my hands dirty on the new SAS tools (grhhh). I actually helped Phil (who I met at Standard Life) get a similar role at Resolution. He stayed on after I finished (in June 2007) eventually finishing up in June 2008.
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