revjim.net

The last few days have been interesting. Well, not really interesting… just different from my usual routine. Instead of performing my usual day-job functions, I've been helping provision facilities for a new call center we're turning up. In the end, it'll have over 500 seats, and it'll be full within 2 weeks, so we've got a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it in.

The call center is stretched over 4 non-adjacent floors of an office building, which means there is a lot of walking to do, both across the floors, and up and down flights of stairs. I've been getting up at 5:00am every morning, and getting home around 5:30pm. By the time 9:00pm comes around, I'm exhausted. I'm sure I'm boring the hell out of Jess only spending about 4 hours with her before I'm ready for bed.

It's absurd to me how much mismanagement ocurrs in a company as large as the one I work in. The company establishes supervisors for everything. But very rarely are the supervisors the people who know how to get anything done. This call center started out with 2 people (not counting the director, who is only overseeing everything and is still doing his normal job). One to handle the people, one to handle the equipment. I'm not sure how well the person who handles the people is doing, because, while I'd love to be involved in that part, I'm not. However, the person who was supposed to handle the equipment isn't doing well at all.

He ended up asking the people-handling person to find him someone technical to help him with the equipment. The person they found is someone I know. He used to be one of my employees. He's fairly competent, and, no doubt has made a huge difference in what they are capable of getting done. However, because of the amount of work needing to be done, they needed more people. So they called me and my team in. We were supposed to work under my ex-employees direction, however, as things are turning out, I'm taking more of a lead role, which I am fine with. However, the problem I have is with the guy in charge. He, seemingly,y has no idea what he's doing.

I'm okay with him not knowing everything. As long as you have good team members who know their parts, you don't really need to know much in order to lead them. But some of the things being done are just absurd. For instance, we have over 500 computers that have to be installed with software. And the image that placed on them before they were shipped was wrong. So I developed a method to fix them pretty quickly and easily. However, this means that every machine needs to be touched by people. Luckily, they enlisted more help from other people. However, instead of getting people here in Dallas to help out (it doesn't take a very technical mind to do what we're doing) they flew in three people from the far reaches of the country to help.

Additionally, the planning is all wrong. If the computers come in on Day 1, and they aren't going to be placed into cubicles until the morning of Day 2, and you've only hired 2 people to do that work, then the computers aren't going to be ready to be used until the night of Day 2. That's just common sense. But the help that was flown in is scheduled to leave on Day 3. So, we have to bust our asses on the night of Day 2 and the morning of Day 3 to get everything done. And for all of Day 1 and most of Day 2, they didn't have anything to do. And now they're leaving. Next week, we'll have different people from different parts of the country coming in to help. It just doesn't make any sense.

I could go on and on with complaints. But instead, I'll give you the gist of what I'm trying to say.

The work has been interesting these past few days because I have been very busy doing things I don't normally do with a very fast time frame for turn around. However, the amount of wasteful money we're spending on this project, and the amount of people standing around doing nothing because of poor planing makes me really loose what little faith I had left in the longevity of the company I work for.