Welcome to Brazen Careerist!

About Me

Hello,

My name is Anne and I am originally from South Africa, but living in the beautiful city of Vancouver. The city where you can snowboard and then paddleboard all on the same day (which I highly recommend).

My focus is system building and all that it encompasses. It's a very generic way of grouping things like process development, user experience prototyping, requirements gathering, training, user interface development, tool implementation, testing, lots of documentation and translating meaning and method into different formats.

I care deeply about the user experience and simplying things down to the essence of what is necessary. The focus being that the answer to any question should really either be yes or no. That a choice presented to a person can be distilled down to most critical elements to make easy and simple to know what to do.

Essentially my belief is that working with software shouldn't be painful and shouldn't shorten someone's lifespan (ie. Blood pressure medication and exposure to software shouldn't correlate).

Thus, I focus on smoothing out mushy and murky process, clearing away unnecessary detail, teaching to educate and help and hopefully making the 8 hours of someone's day better.

Work History

• Self
• Business Analyst
• June 2010 to Present

• I work remotely for a team that resides in Edmonton on a project called ATOMS. ATOMS is the system that assists with managing all aspects of the Trade program in Alberta, Canada. I look after two sub-domains and am responsible for all the requirements gathering, client interactions, UX prototyping, process definitions and refactoring and documentation.

• Fujitsu Consulting
• QA Lead/Business Analyst
• September 2008 to May 2010

• I was involved in a variety of things. I firstly worked as a QA Lead on a project that looked after a grant management application for the Alberta Provincial Government. I implemented a refactored SDLC for the Ministry account and all 34 projects to comply with new audit requirements. Amongst doing that, I also tested a few applications, ran quite a number of UAT sessions, drew up requirements from clients, developed automated tests and gained a deeper appreciation for Ruby.

  I was also involved with a business strategy team whose task it was to reevaluate the Edmonton Business Unit's current strategy and make recommendations. Working with two directors I spent many hours pouring over outcomes-based diagrams, organizational task diagrams, doing surveys and data analysis on the results, presenting to the senior group and learning a massive amount about business strategy. I was privileged to have my process recommendations and organizational team structure plan included.

• PBT Group
• Technical Manager
• April 2007 to April 2008

• I was hired to build up the technology competency that entailed defining the technology strategy, selection of focused toolsets, consultant community development and infrastructure for support for sites across Africa, the Middle East and Australia.

  I implemented a number of things, the most interesting being: infrastructure to support remote development work for both onsite teams and mobile consultants dialing in from places like Sierra Leone and Cameroon and a community training and support program to educate and reconnect the 200 plus consultants working in South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria and the Middle East.

  I managed all websites and their rebuild at the request of marketing to update the look and feel and provide integration into HR to make recruitment easier. I managed a floating team of the most senior technical consultants for tender responses, critical project assistance and project quality reviews.

• Jam Warehouse Software
• QA Manager/Business Analyst
• August 2004 to March 2007

• I was hired to build up the QA department for a growing software development company specialising in asset management software. I put in process, put together a test team, was a part of the senior review group, managed the QA status and resource allocation for 13 projects across two business units. Acquired a taste for agile and open source and working in jeans.

  Worked with an incredible team on an open source commercial project called KnowledgeTree. Got the opportunity to work with local clients and do gap analysis, consultant advisory type stuff. Started delving into automated testing and setting up visualization environments to cover all the platform (think mac, several flavours of linux and obviously windows) and language (over 30 of them) permutations we had . Worked long, crazy hours and discovered a rock climbing gym around the corner for a lunchtime distraction.

Education

• University of Cape Town
• Bachelor of Business Science, Information Systems
• 2000 - 2003

• A mix of business, technical, financial courses sprinkled with a faint brush of philosophy.