No progress

That's right, I haven't made any progress in whatever I'm doing since my last update, and that's really sometime back. Still working in GNS, and the really good news is that I'll get to work there for another 5 months cause I'm only enlisting in October. 24th October to be exact. No more appeals, no more alternative plans, no more bullshit. GNS FOR LIFE....before ns.

So, after it's all said and done I'm gon study in NTU Accountancy. I know it's gonna be a big challenge, probably bigger than any I've met so far. Sink or swim I wouldn't know, but no more big-fish-small-pond talk. Gotta keep my head up and fight to get where I wanna be man, just gotta plug away.

The big news is that there're gonna be 7, or was it 8, new interns coming in next Monday. I really can't imagine where and how they are gonna squeeze into our miserable tiny #06-304 office. Meifei's been frantically trying to clear the files to free up some space and I can't imagine another person squeezing between Wee Kiat and I. Wee Kiat's really muscularly big and I'm not the smallest-sized person around so it's gonna be yet another new type of struggle in GNS I guess.

Work has been really aight, and it's getting aight-er by the day, or maybe I'm getting tighter at it by the day too although I was really really busy at the end of last month. Companies with September year-end gotta file their accounts at end of April and it so happened that I've got so many audit and collation cases with Sept Y/E. As usual my overwhelming negligence left so many loose ends lying around so I'm like running around the office trying to settle all the cases. Fortunately, it's over now and I'm breathing more easily, just a couple of cases on my hand which shouldn't be much of a problem. June/July will be another nightmare though cause it's when the December Y/E accounts start coming in and I'll be working like a beast again.

I guess I'm pretty accustomed to working now. It ain't such a bad job afterall. I get to apply what I've learnt in school, it's not entirely mindless paperwork as many were led to think, it's pretty challenging at times and I'm learning alot at the same time. The pay's not all that bad too... although I would hate to admit it, I'm enjoying myself pretty much now as compared to my schooling days when I had to constantly worry about my finances. How my minimal disposable income restricts me in my expenditures and how I would evil-ly force Pearly to go dutch hahaha. I'm kinda glad for the choices I made and how, satisfactory-esque they have turned out to be.

Update again when I'm not so caught up in my little life, or maybe when Man Utd did the double and lift the Premiership and Champs League trophies. Hope I'm not tempting fate or anything here. Please, roflmaozedong (this cracks me up real bad).

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4 more days

I'm gonna wrap things up in 4 more working days starting next Monday at Canon. Couple of things I learnt from my 3-month effort in promoting best practice and better corporate governance:

1) No amount of policies and procedures or internal controls can mitigate the undesirable effects of intellectual mediocrity of the staff, particularly the process owners.

Actually there's no no. 2, that's about it. Almost everything that could go wrong, all the audit issues that were raised stems from the fact that unqualified personnel are put in charge of processes that are too huge and complicated for them to fully grasp and control. Of course, there're the possibilities of fraud and whatnot, but I'm glad to say that so far incapability is a more frequent obstacle than malice and greed in this company.

Dealing with 'yes-man' colleagues are quite a challenge too. A challenge to my tolerance for apparent lack of intellectual ability, judgment and analytical skills at least. There's this cheesy poster on one of the walls that lists down the basic principles of internal audit in CSPL and one of it says "Never believe what the first person tells you." Professional scepticsm in simpler terms. What part of this do these 'yes-men' don't understand? I'm sure it's very frustrated for people to work under superiors who are distinctly incapable. Thankfully for me it's just 3 months. For H, well, I can only wish him all the best.

Then again there're the really impressive people who won me over despite my initial rather unfavourable impression of them. My manager M and coworker D are classic examples. I would love to have the chance to work under M again cause well, let's just say she knows her stuff. I don't rate D at all for the first 2 weeks but after that I must say that her performance is OK, although sometimes her behaviour wasn't.

Haha trust a temp staff like me to come up with such appraisals...and only after 3 months. All in all it was an awesome experience and definitely much more rewarding than working in GNS. There're no limits to the scope of internal audit, we could be doing financial audits one moment and operational audits the next. There're no standard audit programmes either. You gotta conjure one up yourself and gotta ensure it's the most efficient and effective way to attain your testing target so that no resources are wasted. You're constantly evaluating other departments' performance so you gotta be on top of your game.

Achieve the best results with the least resources, that's what best practice is about isn't it?

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New job.

After close to 5 months at GNS, it's time for me to move over and say goodbye. Told Meifei I'll be leaving at end of this month and hmm, what should I say? It's been a good experience all in all and I've learnt alot in this period of time and got to know some very kind colleagues. I definitely wouldn't mind coming back to work in the future during my Uni vacations, if they'll still take me in that is.

Having said that, I look forward to learning much more in my new job. Went for the interview on Wednesday and geez, I gotta admit that I'm not as zai as I thought I would be. It's my first formal job interview actually, I didn't need to go through an interview at GNS cause Brenda recommended me in. Whatever, what matters is I got through and I'll be wearing a tie to work everyday from July onwards.

I'm thinking, or rather I'm hoping, that my job scope will be more macro and more strategic so I can get another perspective on what I'm doing. Doing stat audits at GNS is like, super micro and vouching and figures and stuff and after a few months it gets rather repetitive. From what I hear from the manager, I'll be more involved in the strategic planning and formulation as compared to just filling up standard audit working papers. For sure there's gonna be lotsa paperwork involved too, and the most 'thrilling' part is that we gotta draft our own working papers cause there's no standard format to follow. It makes sense, cause it wouldn't be internal audit if it's not customised and tailor-made to the company itself. Still I don't think audit would be audit if there's no vouching so I'm probably down for that too.

Bottomline is, it's a new environment, new and exciting job scope, better pay, better office, hopefully shorter working hours (don't know about this yet going down on Tuesday to sort out the details).

Hit back when I got more info about this. Wish me luck people, more importantly wish me good colleagues and superiors.

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