Inside ASI-AP

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.

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.

The interviews for the initial round of candidates for our third Business Development Manager get underway this week to take advantage of David, Bob and Julie all being here in person. The current plan is to have one interview in Melbourne and two in Sydney. The new BDM will be joining Amanda and Martin in the new business group which is dedicated to bringing in new customers to iMIS. Both Amanda and Martin exceeded quota last year, and that along with a continued confidence in the new business market is a trigger to hire to ensure we capitalise on all of the right opportunities (with an emphasis here on the word 'right' - where the potential customer and ASI are aligned in strategies and values). At the same time we are continuing to work on our sales process cycle optimisation although it is harder than expected - but are committed to an outcome that will see higher quota's for both Amanda and Martin.

The open project manager position has now been filled and we are very excited to be welcoming Andrew Kennedy into the ASI Consulting team. Andrew will be based in Sydney; he will be starting the week of June 2nd. Andrew comes to ASI with strong project management experience including at Optus, a national law firm and most recently a software company specialising in customer data integrity solutions. Like myself and some of the other ASIer's, Andrew is engineering educated; and his interests are soccer, rock climbing and teaching spanish.

It was just Lap joining me for lunch today from Melbourne office for our first quarter recognition luncheon. Lap was awarded the core value award of "respect" in the first quarter of 2008 - congratulations Lap! After a year of going to Rockpool each quarter I thought we would try a new restaurant this year, so it was back to Crown again and to the new restaurant right next door to Rockpool - Bistro Guillaume (www.bistroguillaume.com.au).

While promoted as french bistro style the prices were high-end restaurant but luckily the food was outstanding, and I would certainly go back. Lap enjoyed for the first time ever snails for entree and a souffle for dessert !

I caught up with Ross on Friday night by phone. The official Olympic qualifying period had just ended and Ross did not qualify for the Beijing games this year. It is disappointing for Ross, but in many ways the cards were stacked against him this last 12 months or so, and he showed a lot of courage to dig deep and keep it all going. He is enjoying life in Gent, Belgium and is starting to find a routine with his local fencing club and getting onto the European circuit where there are high calibre fencing tournaments every weekend - and just a train ride or car ride away. He is getting to see a lot of Europe - make sure you follow his photos on Facebook if you aren't already.