Inside ASI-AP

Media Release: Advanced Solutions International Strengthens Asia-Pacific Team With Two New Business Development Managers
- Strong financial year for ASI supports a continued push for growth -

Melbourne, 15th July 2010: Advanced Solutions International (ASI) has appointed Ian Wilcock and Bob Ko as business development managers for the Asia-Pacific region in a move to grow its customer base further and expand the company into new markets and territories.

Based in Melbourne both Ian and Bob will be tasked with expanding sales for the company across Australia and New Zealand and further afield to South East Asia.

Media Release: Advanced Solutions International honoured with Australia’s ‘Best Companies to Work For 2010’ accolade

- Dedication to the not-for-profit sector key to ASI’s success -

Melbourne, 24th June 2010

Advanced Solutions International (ASI) has been named one of the 50 best places to work in Australia by the Great Place to Work Institute’s 2010 survey, published today in BRW magazine. This is the second year in a row ASI has received the accolade, placing the not-for-profit partner amongst the exclusive ranks of more commercially-focussed premier workplaces.

2010 represents the second year the illustrious survey has opened eligibility for small companies such as ASI to enter. A testimony to its emphasis on maintaining a great place to work despite global economic difficulty, ASI has been rewarded for its leading approach to flexible working and outstanding dedication to staff recognition and wellbeing.

Last week Melbourne staff celebrated the festive season with dinner at a local greek restaurant. Here are a few pictures from the night.

Following on from our recent results of making the top 50 great places to work in Australia (previous posts here, here and here), this article is the first in a series on the actual results for the survey questions that everyone completed towards the end of 2008.

The questions were divided into 5 major areas - credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. For each article I am going to cover off one of these areas, and then over the remainder of the year there will be continued discussion on individual points as we work to make ASI an even better place to work.

Marla has been putting a few photo streams up into the blog here using her own account in Picasa, but thought it was time to create an insideasiap account that anyone can use.

Username: insideasiap@gmail.com
Password: asiimis15

You can also email photos into the site using this email address: insideasiap.imis15@picasaweb.com

If you have your own photo sites on different platforms you may also want to consider tagging your ASI photos with "insideasiap" so that tag search engines can collate them all over time.

View photos from the ASI Melbourne staff GPTW Celebratory dinner Wed night 13 May. Missing were Nissi (sick baby boy), Colin (leave) and Ross (flying home from Europe). We made the best 50 companies to work for in Australia for 2009! See the media release.

MEDIA RELEASE: You don't have to be Google to be great

Embargoed until 30 April 2009

It’s not every day that a company with around 30 employees gets to be mentioned in the same breath as corporate heavyweights like Google, Coca-Cola, Yahoo!7 and Deloitte.

But that’s what Advanced Solutions International (Asia-Pacific), a software provider to the non-profit community, has achieved after today being named one of Australia’s 50 best companies to work for – despite having one of the smallest workforces on the list.

The list is compiled by the Great Place to Work (GPTW) Institute Australia, part of a US-based research and management consultancy that works with organisations in more than 40 countries and has been releasing the list in the United States for 10 years.

Thought I'd post this as I'm not sure that everyone will know about it. You can have Lap set up your phone message system to email you a .wav file of the recorded message.

A great feature - hope I wasn't the only one who didn't know this!

We welcome Kelly Jones and Pauline Hipkin to the local ASI team. Both started on the same day - Wednesday 13 August 2008. After spending time with Julie first up Wednesday morning, then joining myself and some of the other ASI managers for lunch, it was straight into bootcamp with Jay and Kevin; photo below in the team room with Kevin.

Thursday morning I had the ASI strategy and industry overview sessions of the Bootcamp, pictured below are Kelly and Pauline in the boardroom listening to my presentation. What you can't see is the dancing going on - part of my regular strategy Powerpoints - "The Star Wars theme", "I'm so excited" and "I'm on the road again" all get a short play!

On Friday 1 August we moved out of our North Sydney office which had been our Sydney home for the past 4 years. In fact we have been in North Sydney since Jason first moved there to open up our Sydney presence over 6 years ago.

Now we start our move into the Sydney CBD. For a few reasons - firstly to get higher quality premises equal to our Melbourne office, to get access to flexible boardrooms so we can run events in our office, to be closer to customers, and to be closer to central public transport. These are all the same reasons we moved our Melbourne office into the CBD last year. The Melbourne office move has been one of the best things we have done and I would like to see similar success with the Sydney move.

Andrew Kennedy officially joined us back in June but had a month's holiday already scheduled before he accepted the ASI job, so for most of July he has been away overseas. But he is back this coming week and ready for work. In the few weeks he had with us before going on leave he came to Melbourne for the standard ASI induction program - the week long bootcamp. I took this photo while he was here.

As a full time project manager Andrew becomes part of the global Project Management Office (PMO) for ASI Consulting. Being a part of the global team of project managers means that we should be able to improve the consistency in our professional services - from methodologies, to status reporting and to quality standards - across all regions. Andrew is located in Sydney.

I have been doing interviews at a rate of 2-3 per week over the last few weeks for the open sales positions. This is in addition to interviews Jason has been doing for the open consulting positions. Jason has had some success and will be announcing a new consultant joining our team in the next few days.

We made an offer to a strong sales candidate but unfortunately he received a better offer from his existing employer and he subsequently rejected our offer. So we continue the search and the interviews.

I have met some great people during the interviews - enthusiastic and talented people - that really give me some enthusiasm about work generally and growing our business. It also makes me appreciate how good our current team is when I get to compare our team against the market.

Can be deleted ...

I was in Sydney last Thursday and Friday trying to get back to a regular monthly visit to Sydney. On Thursday I met up with Finsia for a brief project status update following their renewals being run, and then I attended the project kick off meeting for National Breast Cancer Foundation.

Friday I met for breakfast with Nasser - who used to work with ASI Consulting - and has now setup his own consulting business (Avion Software www.avion-software.com) and has signed up as an iMIS Authorised Consultant. We are already using Nasser for a number of ASI projects and will continue to help him build his iMIS business as he starts to work directly with iMIS customers. Nasser's business partner is Sashank Kotcherlakota; and Sashank is also iMIS experienced as he worked for a few years at CPA Australia as a developer and he worked on both iMIS web and marketing suite projects while there.

After relocating the Melbourne office last year, this year it is the turn of the Sydney office. We are moving from North Sydney into the Sydney CBD area - which gets us closer to customers, transport options and higher quality premises. To support our telecommute environment we are taking out space in a shared executive office on level 33 of Australia Square - which is located at 264 George Street (down towards the Circular Quay end of George Street). Australia Square is an iconic building in that it is a round tower which at the time it was built was the tallest building in Sydney.