This is more of a feel good post.
I guess after what I could only describe to the best of my linguistic ability as a "bleh" monday, over the course of the past couple of weeks I am having staff members understanding their day to day tasks to the point that they are now involved in projects and development tasks to help assist their work in association with the development team by auto managing remedial, rudimentary manual tasks.
In layman's terms? Having things done quicker and information of what's happening addressed as quickly as possible.
At Exetel, we always think outside the box. Or in this case, the triangle..
A lot of these (excluding of course, the actual deployment of automating the processes of delivering a product) a fairly minor for the most part once the large scale processes are put in place, but think of it like this;
- Exetel has approximately 60,000 customers, 45,000 or so with some type of ADSL1, ADSL2 Optus or ADSL2 Powertel service.
- Suppliers involved include Telstra, Optus, Powertel, Unwired,
- Each supplier has their own intricate process and systems for delivering a service which Exetel has deliver, CONSISTENTLY, 100% of the time or certainly as much as feasibly possible.
- Staff also answer provisioning enquiries over the phone
- Staff also answer helpdesk tickets
So what kind of people power are we talking about with all these issues/workloads/responsiblities?
Including myself overseeing the department you are looking at 3. That's THREE people over looking the complete activations process. The ratio speaks for itsself.
But none of this would be possible if not for two very important things;
- the insight to develop key processes to get orders through quicker, reject less, and decrease manual workload
- The outstanding technical and code development internally to interact with supplier systems as well as our own.
These things go hand in hand.
Any post about corporate productivity warrants an immediate supporting graph - and here's mine.
Just as important in my mind are the 'fail-safe' implementations that have to be reported to know when something isn't working, because let's face it, if it was truly automatic in every sense of the word, well then we could all have a trip to the Bahamas sipping on coconut milk...
And really this should be the essence of anyone working in Activations/provisioning for any product they deliver. You only need to be doing work in terms of improving what's already there and fixing what is currently there.