I've moved from SSW to Oakton!

Just had my last day at SSW after 8.5 years! We had a great time at Strike Bowling @ Fox Studios in Centennial Park - and an even better dinner at Cine Italian restaurant down the street. After the obligatory speeches and hugs, that was it!!!

I started at Oakton this morning with 5 others (the equal largest weekly intake) with a lovely woman called Fiona Begg. I was blown away by her enthusiasm for the company and it has definitely rubbed off on me. I am very much looking forward to starting on a new Lend Lease project through Oakton (Stock Code 'OKN') which will deal with Property Funds Management.

After the induction, I was given a runthrough of the work to be done at Lend Lease. I also had some spare time which I used to look into the Property funds management business in general. I found some very illuminating articles on the software currently available at http://www.avo.gov.au/PropertyFundManagementDiscountedCashFlow.htm. Looking through some of the articles linked to on this site gave me a good overview of some of the tools used. It appears that there is an industry leading application called "DYNA" which is currently used by Lend Lease - along with Excel.

It seems that what ever the company, there is always a worrying number of spreadsheets lurking around where business-critical applications should be. I don't want to go into the many problems there are with spreadsheets - but I would hope that you don't want millions of dollars going awry when you incorrectly cut and paste a formula! After all the spreadsheets I've seen at Queensland Water Infrastructure and Pfizer, my thoughts were .... "Oh no! Not again!"

I also noticed that (like most companies), that Timesheets are not kept at the task level, but rather X number of hours is just allocated to a client. This is a lot simpler than the level of detail we had to provide at SSW. Perhaps our clients were just more demanding.

One of the things that Mark Liu mentioned when I gave him a lift to the bowling was that his brother John Liu (with whom I worked with for a year at SmartSalary) is also at Oakton. This means that I will potentially be working with 4 people I have worked with previously :

1. Ryan Macnamee will be my supervisor (with whom I worked on the Qantas meal forecasting application at his old company Datacom)
2. Andrew Weaver (who used to work at SSW) who now works at Lend Lease directly
3. Tristan Kurniawan (who is contracting to Lend Lease via SSW)
4. John Liu (if he moves to the Lend Lease project).

So it is really more like changing clients at SSW than moving company... Only bad thing is that I have to start 7:45am tomorrow!