One of the things I love about being a business analyst is that every day is different. Even if you’re working on just one project, there are a range of processes you’re working through with clients, different data sets you’re mapping, solutions to design, and you get to work with the whole team.

Working with people in different timezones (and being located in the latest of the timezones), means that in the mornings I’ve usually got a stack of messages from people I’m working with and today is no exception. I’ll often ping someone in an east coast time zone when I finish up for the day, and they are then able to run with things before I’ve had my morning coffee in Western Australia. The project I’m working on currently also includes partner organisations around the world, so frequently mornings are the best time for meeting with all of those. 

Today started with celebrations for Piers’ birthday – coffee and cakes and silly hats with the whole gang from our offices around Australia. We were already pretty good at working remotely with clients and our colleagues in other states, but the pandemic has really sharpened our skills at this. For the celebration, in the Perth office we had everyone on a big screen so that we could stop by for a chat, and also allow all of us to join in a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday!

After the celebrations, it was back to work, starting with a meeting with some of our devops team and another of our business analysts in Tasmania to brainstorm the architecture for a complex application and storage system that will be hosted in AWS. As with all meetings, this then resulted in each of us going away to do our part of the work and documentation, ready for presentation to the client. For me, this means checking through the processes we have designed and superimposing them over the AWS infrastructure design to make sure that the system architecture is complete for the workflows.

We’re also working with some new open source software in my current project, so I’ve been looking at how it functions to gain expertise myself, and also to determine how it will change the way data flows through the system. We’ve been lucky to partner with the original developers of this software, so we’re getting great advice on it, as well as the opportunity to feed back how we’re using it with our clients. 

Commuting home at lunchtime is a great way to clear my head to spend the afternoon tackling tasks that need focussed time. Gaia’s flexible working is really helpful to me in that regard as I find it much easier to do focussed work at home than the office – I’m fortunate to have a quiet home office! Before that though, I am able to quickly troubleshoot a problem another client is having with their system for our support team, allowing the client to get back to work within 10 minutes of logging the issue. 

While I specialise in archives and collections projects, there are several different systems that we support and develop for in that area, as well as many different clients in almost every state in Australia. Tomorrow is an early start to lead a workshop on the east coast and then start working on the outcomes from that. Every day is truly a one-off. 

We’ve got a lot of big projects in progress and coming up, so if you can see yourself working for Gaia Resources, then feel free to get in touch with our recruitment team, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg