Rick Perks

Background

About Rick Perks

I commenced my IT career in 1981 as a Fortran programmer for the Council of the City of Sydney. I have since worked as a business analyst and application consultant in financial services and health domains, and found my niche in project management and product management. For a time I was Director of Products for Asia, Pacific and Japan for S1 Corporation.This provided a wild ride through the.com boom, ending up in the early with share options worth about enough for a nice dinner! I ran my own company Perkservices Pty Ltd for 10 years working for various clients in the financial, healthcare and public transport domains. While working at Yarra Trams (YT) as a Principal Project Manager I led the remediation and life extension of the antique automatic vehicle monitoring (AVM) system, design and construct of a secondary operations centre, the rollout of passenger information solutions across a diverse fleet, as well as being accountable for the daily operation of all passenger information assets. I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2016 and have backed away from the high pressure project management and operational roles. I continue to act as an Advisor to the YT AVM program on an as-required basis. Late in 2017 I formed WorkSteps with business partners James Cole and Mathew McRobbie, with the goal to build a micro-services integration framework (‘WorkSteps Core’) that provides robust, documented and transparent integrations between control and / or information systems, be they commercial-off-the-shelf or bespoke. Combined with this is a data and applications framework that enables rapid implementation of business-specific solutions optimised for the way in which each business operates. While these solutions can work in any industry, they have been proven in the public transport domain. Worksteps commenced trading as Timpany in mid 2019, and WorkSteps Core has been renamed Timpany.Studio. I am now working with Matt and James on extending Timpany’s range of purpose-built applications for PT Operators for incident, disruption and performance management and controller decision support, and using Timpany Studio for standards-based reporting and integration using SIRI, GTFS, NeTEx and ITxPT.