Pat’s Point of View

The life of a consultant is a much varied one. My work environment can be different from one day to the next; in an office one day, workshop the next; call centre here, corporate HQ there; noisy bunch, morgue-like quiet; heart of the city, God-knows-where.

Going from client to client, office to office, desk to desk, is like starting a new job every few weeks. You are in a different environment, you don’t know anyone and people look at you funny when you make ‘school boy errors’ (look how was I supposed to know you had to hold down all three buttons to get hot water to come out, I mean come on people!). On top of this you need to get the job done efficiently. Luckily the process of learning your way around and learning about an organisation is closely aligned with needs analysis work. You have to get to know people and learn how it all ticks.

You get to travel a bit too—I’ve been to most Australian capital cities recently, but no overseas yet. Today I just happen to be in an outer suburb of Brisbane. This is interesting as you get to see the differences between cities (and states). Maybe it’s because of the time I spent overseas or because my impressions of other places in Australia were shaped by childhood experiences (and I didn’t pay much attention), but in the last year I have noticed many things during my interstate travel. For example, the accent. I used to dismiss Brits who said they could hear differences in the Australian accents of people from, say, Sydney and Perth. But I now believe there is a difference. Most recently, I’ve noticed the Brisbane (or perhaps Queensland) accent and a while back, the Adelaide accent.

The other thing I have noticed is the number of Kiwis over here. Again, maybe I just didn’t notice before, but since coming back from the UK it seems the level of immigration from New Zealand has shot up. Not that this is a bad thing, but it’s noticeable.

Anyway, I’m off to earn some more frequent flyer points.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 9:25 am and is filed under Consulting. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.