Who got that job?

Were you one of the people who applied for this job and wondered who got it?

Job title: Operations manager.

For: Sanderson.


For most of us, a malfunctioning computer program has the same effect as a broken-down car - the resulting fury can ruin your day.

Not so for Robert Shelwell, the new operations manager for IT company Sanderson.

The excitement of his new job is the troubleshooting it will involve.

"That's the challenge," says Shelwell, who immigrated from Pretoria in South Africa four years ago with his wife and three sons, now aged 4 to 14.

"No one day is the same as the next," he says, "and that's the bit that excites one. Being in the tech environment means things are never the same."

The position demands a hands-on approach. The job advertisement asked for someone who would "enjoy getting your sleeves rolled up and working alongside the team to support and understand their needs".

Says Shelwell, who has a degree in business management: "One big challenge is to create an environment so [staff] want to stay." The other challenge is giving customers what they want "and a bit more".

The job brings Shelwell full circle, in a way: when he started in his former post, at Price WaterhouseCoopers, an early assignment was with Sanderson.

Sanderson's main product is Gentrack, a customer information and billing system used by more than 80 per cent of the country's major electricity and gas retailers.