First week back

It’s been a busy first week back.  While I’ve been trying to get the project planning for our work with the Atlas of Living Australia done, we’ve had a bunch of other things happening, too.

On Monday I subjected the gang to a very long powerpoint presentation about our upcoming year, the plans for the business and some of the milestones for us to hit.  It was the longest presentation I’ve ever made, and I had to feel sorry for the audience.  But we broke it up into reasonable chunks, and had a nice lunch over at Siena’s in Leederville, and ice-cream in the afternoon.  Then we reshuffled our office to accommodate the new structures.  It was a very productive (and informative) first day back.

Ben Khoo also started with us on Monday.  Already Ben’s been hammering away at projects and systems – we can tell because he has a very loud and clicky keyboard!

On Tuesday Corinne rolled out our new Quality Assurance system.  It’s not an accredited one yet, but over the past year she’s been working hard to get a more formalized approach to our work put in writing.  I am already seeing the benefits – it’s not one of those “here’s a new process” QA systems, but one we’ve built around our own systems.   Now that we’re all up to speed with the system, it will be great to see this taking off.

Anthony (AJ) rolled out our new “collaboration suite”, Zimbra, on Wednesday.  This replaces Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and is our first real steps towards embracing open source in our business.  AJ has big plans for “eating our own dog food” and incorporating a lot of changes into our systems over the coming months.  I’ll leave more detail of that to the man himself – I’m sure that when the frustration of enabling mobile synchronization of our Zimbra calendars wears off he’ll be ready to impart some more of his considerable knowledge on the world…

Thursday was relatively quiet.  I brought in some more plants for the office – well, seeds, really – based on the fact that AJ’s chilli plants are about a foot tall in his office.  So we’ve put in some small pots with rosemary, mint, etc to see if we can get some productive plants in our office as well as the decorative ones we already have.  Oh, and the new Yuma arrived from Trimble, but more on that when we’ve actually done some testing with it.

Today has been even quieter.  Everything has been bedded down (I am no longer suffer from missing calendars and contacts on my phone), our plans for 2010 are settled in and we’re ready to rock and roll.

Finally in this post, I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures from our Christmas function from 2009.  On Christmas Eve we all went to Rottnest for the day, and had a load of fun cycling around, having a few drinks at the Quokka Arms, and swimming in the Basin.

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