From Ken’s desk April 2011

We didn’t see thiscoming. I am referring of course to the earthquake that decimated most of Christchurch on 22 February. We were starting to rebuild after the September earthquake. No one died in that earthquake, so the shock at the significant loss of life and destruction of the CBD this time around has had many of us wondering about the long-term impact on the Garden City. The CBD will be out of action for months, if not the remainder of 2011 and beyond. The drop zone of several high-rise buildings makes the CBD extremely unsafe. You may have noticed that we didn’t quite get the March newsletter out. Our website developers (Wired Internet Group) were in a similar position to us – in a state of shock about what was going to happen next and not being able to access offices.

At HMA we had taken the lease of the fourth floor in Westpark Tower, completed the refit and moved in. We were really enjoying the experience of our new place and were about to host a range of training events. February 22nd of course changed that dramatically. We are currently locked out of the building so the team are working from their own homes for the short-term. At this stage we don’t know how long it will be before we can move back in – the engineers will have to give us the nod with what needs to be done to fix the building and this will dictate when we can reoccupy. This also means that we cannot access those day-to-day resources we take for granted. We were able to rescue our server and computers a few days after the earthquake so from that perspective we were able to secure our intellectual property.

We have appreciated the understanding of our clients that we have been working hard under challenging conditions to manage and deliver on our contracted commitments. As you can imagine the disruption to our routines, the emotional reactions to uncertainty of ongoing aftershocks, the difficulty of getting around the city on damaged roads, our inability to access our resources from the office, all creates an additional level of challenge for us. On top of the day-to-day challenges of managing these daily issues, working from remote locations runs the risk of losing our connectivity as a team. We have been using Skype as a way to remain connected on a daily basis with each other.

We are continuing to keep some of our short courses going. While these will be based outside of Christchurch due to obvious reasons, we hope to be offering opportunities in the second half of the year from our Christchurch base. That way we can contribute to rebuilding our beautiful city. Next month we will be in a better position to provide you with a schedule of our training programme.

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