Resting.....Again

Now I have finished another 13 month contract - this time at Cooperative Financial Services in Manchester. This rest gives another opportunity to complete some much delayed decorating, as well as start some projects in the garden, of which more later.

CFS has been much in the news since I finished. First of all, they dropped their bid to buy the 632 branches that Lloyds Banking Group were being forced by Brussels to offload. Then almost immediately, they have had to disclose that their Brittania brand had been hiding some very sorry property loans. This led to their bonds being classed as junk by one of the three major rating agencies, and the almost instant departure of their chief executive.

Upgrading to SAS 9.3

NOTE: The blog of RTSL.eu - Development with SAS®: NOTE: Upgrading to SAS 9.3

Three Day Weeks

Today I start doing three day weeks. I am not complaining though. I only have to go to th.office three days per week. The other two days I work from home. The reason for this is that we now have ten people in the team and we only have six desks.

Warehousing with Lloyds

I am now working at Lloyds Banking Group, helping to build a Risk Warehouse for the combined group. This project is intended to replace a number of different (fragmented) solutions within the enlarged LBG group. The contract started at the beginning of August and will run through until the end of March 2011.

My involvement will be to design and build a couple of modules that will help the group to manage the risk in their loan book.

The project is using SAS 9.2 and utilises DI Studio, Enterprise Guide and other tools. It will run on a GRID environment, a number of servers will be available to route the processing request and split the processing intelligently among the servers available.

Mortgaging the future

Started at Bradford & Bingley today. They have hired me to help deliver Treasury reporting into the data warehouse. This involves specifying and developing reports from the existing warehouse structure together with the addition of a treasury application into the warehouse.

And because this is clearly not going to keep me busy all of the time, I am also to help to identify reporting requirements for archived databases. More about both these projects later.

Possible New Contract - At Last

Went to see Royal Bank of Scotland today - they want a SAS analyst who can also do Excel. Seems a good alternative to going back to HBOS who do not seem to be able to get the project they have started.

The meter's running out

It is nearing the end of my time at British Gas. I have been productive, but the piece of work I was brought in to do is almost complete. I hear that HBOS (now called Lloyds Banking Group) want me back to do some migration work. I am waiting to hear.....