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.