New Job - First Impressions

So here we are, two weeks into my new job. Time for a bit of a first impressions blog.

Wow! The commute sucks but my new job is great. Once the schools are back my drive to work will take between 60 and 90 mins and my drive home will take 80+ minutes. At the moment it is OK as the traffic is quiet in the morning and manageable in the evening.

My job title is “Senior Business Analyst”, but my role can be summed up as helping the business decide how it wants to change it’s processes and then helping to drive that change though. Most of this will be through IT projects, but it should also include process re-engineering.

I am kind of going back to my roots with this move to L&G, as it’s core business (Protection) is what I started out doing at both Standard Life and NAB.

The people here are all really friendly (even the contractors!) and whilst politics clearly play a part on the day to day machinations of the company, they don’t seem to cause too many blockages.

The building has an odd layout (being like a giant figure 8), and the loos are all in the central hub (which is annoying as I work at the top of the figure 8 and the canteen / café is at the bottom of the 8). The café does a nice cappuccino and the restaurant is reasonably priced (if not subsidised) and the food is of good quality.

Whilst I haven’t got my own laptop yet, the PCs and infrastructure seem to work well, although I am dismayed to be using Office 2000 again. Using Outlook as opposed to Lotus Notes is also a refreshing change.

The current big project is close to deployment and looks like it will work well. The majority of my time at the moment is being spent with the contractors learning about the new system so that, along with the other new starts, we can become the new business experts on the system.

I am the second new analyst to be hired in the last month, with one more joining this week and another in the New Year. I think the ultimate goal is to recruit 5 in total, so they are still one short. The team consists entirely of contractors and a permy manager, so the business is clearly looking for fresh blood to clear out the contractors. I hope we are given ample time for the “knowledge transfer”.

I also need to come up with a new feature for my Blog header as this greenfields site is completely devoid of celebrities! Suggestions on a post card!