In my time at Barrick Gold Corporation I undertook work in two different projects, these were relating to physical office movement and finding computers that were from our office but however had made it offsite.

When I first joined, Barrick Gold Perth was in a state of mid move, staff were both based at the new office in the BHP Building moving from Quayside on Mill down the road. During this time I was tasked to help users get their IT equipment ready to move and assist with housekeeping to install or remove any components that were required along the way, this included making sure that as many users as we could were migrated from Desktop machines to Notebooks to support the new global portable office initiative and installing dual screen setups to enable the user to simply press a button on the docking station to remove their Notebook when they wished to work away from their desk. Post move IT staff disassembled items to be kept as backup equipment and checking all assets were accounted for prior to signing off the lease end.

Once the move was completed we were all assigned individual projects to work through in the following months, I was personally assigned the task of tracking non localised computers while others were given tasks such as overhaul of the IT ticketing system, virtualisation and separation of services on physical infrastructure, post migration user acceptance in regards to the physical move mentioned above and other tasks arising from change requests. At first I was handed a list of systems that I was required to track down, the list was approximately 50 computers, at first I thought this shouldn't be too hard, but I thought wrong, some of these systems hadn't even been connected to the network for more than 18 months on further investigation. Upon joining the organisation every person is assigned a Notebook, this stays with them at all times while with Barrick, as users move between sites it goes with them, when someone moves it will become the property and responcibility of the site that they are working on however this did not always happen, this would be due to such situations as equipment breakdown, it would be swapped out immediately for something similar and upon repair be reasseted to the site it was left with some staff forgetting to update the international asset register. For each computer I was required to fill out a short report on the status of it, this included information such as where it is located, why it was removed from our site, the usability either working or not and who we can contact should their be any more questions. This task become challenging towards the end as sometimes it would involve breaking language barriers in the case of talking to our PNG and African teams who spoke very little English, following hearsay to try and track the last known user down and sometimes patience waiting for someone to get back to you as sometimes staff would be only communicable a few times in the month due to being in the middle of no where, with little to no access to the outside world.