Rense (pictured on the left) has been a part of our team for over 15 years, making him one of our most experienced members at Grexx. As a senior consultant, he has an impressive list of successful projects attached to his name.

"I did HEAO Business Management Informatics. From my internship, I started working at what is now called Logica and I have been on secondment at several financial companies such as Nationale Nederlanden, ABN AMRO and ING. For example, around 2006, I was involved in setting up a physical distribution channel for the Postbank. The bank had strong ties with PTT Post; for banking matters you could go to the post offices. When this partnership ended, new physical branches had to be established, because online banking was far from being the standard. For this new physical distribution channel, I set up the processes around savings, investments, mortgages, and insurance. It was a completely different world than today, with the forerunners of companies we now know as PostNL and ING.

Earlier on a project with AGIS Health Insurance, I got to know Maarten van der Jagt and Gert-Jan Koetsier. When Maarten left for Grexx in 2006, he was enthusiastic about his new positions and motivated Gert-Jan to join Grexx. So in 2008 I too made the transfer to Grexx. And now we are more than fifteen years on..."
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From building to guiding

"As a consultant, I have experienced quite a few implementations in recent years. I have a lot of customer contact and like to collaborate with my customers; I research the playing field and ask the right questions. We discuss requirements and wishes, and together we determine the best solution. Then I make sure we develop an application on the Grexx Platform that fits that. At least, that's how it's often been over the past fifteen years. But of course, we are in a transformation at Grexx, our way of working is changing. 

We used to build applications for our customers. In recent years, we have made our Grexx Platform low code, which means that it is very user-friendly for customers to build applications themselves. My role will therefore change somewhat over time. Less building, more supporting, thinking along with the customer's team and facilitating the process." 

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Monthly updates

"As a consultant, you work independently. We regularly spar amongst ourselves about implementation choices and possibilities on the platform, but you never know what's going on with all your colleagues. To keep each other informed about ongoing projects, Maarten and I came up with the monthly consultancy meeting: a fixed moment for our fellow consultants to get together and share best practices and successes.

We started doing it a year and a half ago, when we could return to the office in full after the mandatory working from home. Working from home was now well established and office days were less obvious than pre-Corona times. We missed the conversations at the coffee machine; we wanted to strengthen the connection a bit. 

Hence the monthly meeting. There are 15 to 25 of us then, both business consultants and DevOps technical consultants. We always ask one colleague to talk a little more about what's on his or her mind and the rest of us learn from them. Sometimes it is technical, sometimes we go deeper into a specific trend or talk extensively about a customer. It helps us understand each other better and know what's going on everywhere. Most people are in the office frequently. I'm there one or two days a week myself, but it's good to speak to each other regularly about content."