Culture shock: Out-placed to an outsourcer

After leaving CSC Australia in 2005, Rowsell immediately found a project management consultancy role for the development, implementation, testing and deployment of a capital project management system for BlueScope Steel.

"Unfortunately, the project had to be put on hold in November 2008 because of the economic downturn," Rowsell laments.

But another opportunity had already presented itself. Rowsell "bumped" into a former BHP IT colleague he worked with in the 1990s called Phillip Evans, in a supermarket in Wollongong.

Evans had founded his own software ISV, Evanscorp.

"At the time the capital project management system had a significant missing piece around management of capital project costs. We engaged Evanscorp to develop a bespoke "cost management web application", Rowsell says.

Evanscorp then took Rowsell on as its senior project manager.

He is responsible for the project management of projects associated with the company's Remunerate product for managing pay review cycles in large organisations, and is also exploring an opportunity to secure the intellectual property from the bespoke software system the company developed for BlueScope Steel and spin it off as a separate product offering.

"Remunerate came out of work done previously by Evanscorp for BHP Billiton (with BHP Billiton's blessing)," Rowsell explains.

"Evanscorp took the product developed for BHP and developed it further to create Remunerate, and it has never looked back. So far, Remunerate has been successfully implemented at many large companies, both private and public with quite a few from the Top 100 ASX."

Evanscorp has "a number" of other products in the pipeline following the success of Remunerate in the global market, Rowsell says.

Rowsell said he would also like to turn his hand to teaching, and has recently applied for a role as a relief IT teacher at Wollongong TAFE.

"When I was part of the capital project management system deployment, I ran a single day course for project managers internally," Rowsell says.

"I really enjoyed the training part of the project and mentoring the project managers in how to use the new system."