One Year On

So, about now, a year ago, I was eating pizza with my Keystone colleagues, at my lunchtime leaving do. I'd been part of Keystone since it's inception - in fact, since BEFORE it's inception, as I'd joined CCS IT Limited in 1998 - four years before Keystone was launched. It was a sad day - the last of a good number of sad days leading up to it, as I'd toured the country saying goodbye to various customers - many of whom I'd known much longer than most of the Keystone team, and who I looked upon as good friends too.

Everyone was asking the same thing: "What are you planning to do now?". "Somewhere between full time consultancy and full retirement", I said - "depending on how much the phone rings from Monday onwards!". Ultimately, I hoped that it would be semi-retirement - spending 50% of my time working with Keystone customers - and the rest getting increasingly involved in athletics, helping out at my son's club, where I look after the website, write reports, officiate, record results etc etc.

And, a year on, that's pretty much how it's worked out. Apart from the time I spend working for my brother on Monday's (looking after the payroll, invoicing etc for his engineering firm), I do spend around half of my time helping Keystone users make the most of the system.

It's very enjoyable work. In many cases I was the guy who actually sold them the system in the first place - and for me, I was always concerned that they should reap the benefits of investing in our 'Keystone baby'. So, to now help in actually achieving the vision we shared when they bought Keystone, has been very rewarding.

The variety of work has been great. In many cases, customers have struggled to devote as much time to the system as they'd hoped - still needing to do the day job, of course - so they've needed support in bringing the data up to date, correcting errors, adjusting their configuration - and in getting out the reports that they need to run the business. Properly resourcing Keystone has been a common issue for users - and I've been able to fill that gap - sometimes as a single, distinct piece of work - and often over the course of repeated, or ongoing visits.

One of the most frequent requests has been to help with Sustainability Modelling - applying my experience from around the sector, and past work with our dearly departed friend and ally, Andrew Thomas (whom I still miss a lot), to configure Keystone's standard functionality to enable reporting on property performance. This has always been a pet subject of mine, and it's been very stimulating to see the results (and issues!) that emerge from the system. One customer needed functionality that wasn't part of Keystone, so we've worked together on a spreadsheet based model that projects asset yield on a year by year basis, so as to see where and when future issues might occur. This has been one of the most interesting pieces of work in the past 12 months.

Elsewhere I've written Excel-based utilities to scan folders for files to be used as Attachments in Keystone, and to create the data required to populate KGI's - and to read folders full of CP12's, and work out which KSI Jobs they relate to, so they can be bulk loaded into Keystone. I always did enjoy writing a bit of VB! :-)

I helped one customer put together their planned programme for the next 10 years - using the Planned Work functions in KAM. At Keystone we'd worked hard to crack this particular 'nut', so it was fantastic to use these functions myself 'in anger' and see them up to the job!

I've helped with KAR, I've assisted a customer in actually getting KSI into live use, I've written comprehensive reports on Keystone's data quality, I've worked on improving energy data, I've done lots of work on data to support the Welsh Housing Quality Standard - and I've run more KGI's than even I have had hot dinners!

All in all, it's been an interesting and rewarding 12 months - working with good people to achieve some great results. Although I ended up a Keystone's "Sales Director", I was never a salesman - I was always more interested in the problem we were trying to solve - and often frustrated not to be involved in realising the vision, once the order was received.

Here's to another 12 months of making Keystone successful!