A Repost...

Thursday, October 21, 2004

A Year of Blogging

It's the 1st week of Ramadhan and surprisingly, it has been going smoothly for me this year. InsyaAllah, I'll get through it with little problem.

So, what's new?

Well, Jehan is now 3 1/2 years old. His Mama has just taken up a job with her friend from the Qigong group. So we decided that we'd let him try Smartreaders, more for him to socialise with other kids than anything else. Fortunately, the place at Mutiara Damansara also provides daycare facilities. We knew he'd be okay as he always gets comfortable with other people around him real quick or doesn't at all.

I left my position at a consultancy company in January 2004. The project that they took me on for didn't materialise although it was given approval in principle earlier. I then spent a couple of months lounging around, attending interviews and invested in a company started by Khairi.

After several start and stops, I decided that I had enough of Khairi as a business partner. I hope the money that went to him was spent wisely. I won't bother about asking for the money back because it will just be another source of pain that would taint a friendship that started when we were both 16.

Then there is Che Lan. He made me Associate Director with his company. I was to be paid for the time that I put in preparing presentations, attending meetings and such. I never saw the money that I had earned. What hurt me more was the knowledge that the company was behind in paying their employees by more than a month while he drives his Volvo.

I thought he had potential to be really successful when we first met in the 1980's. Seeing how he operates leaves me with no wonder about the loss of his major accounts and the steady, relatively easy revenue. Good luck, buddy. I hope that my first impression holds true and that you would turn out the successful and assertive entrepreneur that I thought you would be.

Deng took the VSS that he was offered from one of the Big 5 consulting companies. He laid low for a while before hooking up with Zaidi. Zaidi was my junior by about 2 years in Bukit Bintang. He set up a company with Ahmad and managed to bag the Pos Laju account. We also got to do the Business Process Reengineering portion and Change Management at MOHR.

It's amazing how Malaysian business works. The Bumi company gets the contract for Phase 2 of a MOHR project, then subs it out 100% to a non-Bumi company. They then found out that Change Management refers to more than logging the Requests for Change and making the changes to the system and that they also did not have the expertise in Business Process Reengineering. So, the Sub Con then further subs it out to us. It serves the first clueless Bumi company right...throw away the opportunity to build your own expertise and experience when trusted with it. I believe the word is “Amanah”.

There goes the chance of employing deserving Bumi IT graduates and giving them the window to flex their knowledge harvested over 4 years of slogging at the University. But, then again...the words slogging and Bumi in a sentence cannot be right...

So their loss is our gain, but there is little to rejoice in this hollow victory. I will be here at Putrajaya till January 2006, InsyaAllah, and hope to give some semblance of order and value to the taxpayers of Malaysia when these clowns implement the system.

However, the reality of making sure of this is very dim as Change Management and Business Process Reengineering are but 2 very small packages in the whole scheme of a system implementation.

So, we'll see...