End of an Era

An era has ended. I have finished at HBOS after 21 months. First of all to help kick start the Competition Commission investigation into the sale of PPI which was supposed to last 3 weeks! Within a week, it got extended to six months.

At the end of 2007, HBOS asked me to stay on to help resuscitate a warehouse development project that got suspended by the PPI investigation. This warehouse was intended to enable reporting to be performed on the 3rd party insurance. This kept me busy when there did not appear to be much work around in the North West, and also meant I was available to help with further work on the PPI project.

During most of 2008, I was involved in a new warehouse project to create a warehouse for the 1st party insurance system. Whereas 3rd party had not been properly designed, the 1st party application was implemented by more structured methods.

This phase was delivered eventually during December 2008, allowing the warehouse team to think how they were to migrate to the new server platform running on a Netezza server, and then how they were to build the reporting systems on this warehouse.

The early part of 2009 was spent refining the existing 3rd party warehouse, cleaning up the base layer to allow the reporting functionality to be built on a robust base layer.

HBOS General Insurance - another extension

It is now November 2008, and we have almost completed the Irish warehouse, apart from some glitches where the backfilled tables suddenly disappear - apparently, the person who did this was not aware that these were about to become production tables.

Then, eventually, the team running the first warehouse were now in a position to start updating it to ensure its accuracy. I have another four months work to do if I want. Because the credit crunch is now reducing the amount of work elsewhere, I accept the extension.

This project will allow the cleaning up of the warehouse to reflect the design benefits of the Irish warehouse. That will make this one work better (and more accurately).

HBOS General Insurance - another extension

It is now July 2008 and HBOS want me to continue with the present contract until the end of November. Considering that there seems to be no work at all in the North West of England, I accept. HBOS very generously allow me to do all my work for five days in four days each week. This allows me an extra day each weekend to do other things, like look after my accounting practice clients.

HBOS General Insurance

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.

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.

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.

First Post

This is the first weblog I have created. At the moment, I do not know what else to write, but no doubt will find something later