It’s typically a horror story, right?
Employees forced to train their offshore replacements.
I’m not losing my job. I’m not even changing my job. But, I am getting replaced. And I have to train my replacements. And I’m pretty excited about it.
My job involves a lot of different roles. One of the most time consuming is managing outages. I’m sort of the on-field general who directs the call when something goes wrong.
Hey, it’s an easy gig. . .if nothing goes wrong. And sometimes it will be weeks without an outage. Other times, they come multiple times per day. And they are the most important thing I do. By that I mean they take precedance over any other activity.
So, if I was on a date, or a camping trip, or at a wedding reception, I had to take a call. Courtroom? Yep. Hiking up the side of a mountain at 7,000 feet? Yep. I’ve been doing it for over six years.
And for years I asked for help. And finally, we’re doing putting it in place.
The good news is that management decided it needed 8 people to cover for me. That’s not bad. I mean, if they’d pay me eight times what they are paying me. . .
The team we created, the Diamond Team, was staffed with experienced Incident Managers. But, they weren’t experienced with my account. They didn’t have six years of support and troubleshooting experience. I did.
Rodney, now that the new Diamond Team is active, it shoudl free up a lot of your time, right?
Not really. I used to just manage the calls. Now I have to manage and teach.
Have you ever asked a child to help you with a task? I mean a small child. It’s easier to simply do the work yourself than let a toddler “help.”
Have you ever asked a teenager to help you with a task? I mean one who wasn’t required to help as a small child? It’s easier to simply do the work yourself than try to get an untrained teenager to “help.”
And that’s the irony. Getting help requires more work than simply doing it yourself. But, eventually the payoff comes later. When, you have teenagers who know how to clean up after themselves, cook an edible meal and separate the white clothes from the colors.
I expect my job to get harder not easier over the coming weeks. We took our first outage call today with the new Diamond Team. It took almost twice as long. Before I could make a decision, I had to explain to the Diamond Team member what I was doing and why.
Eventually the outage was resolved and I collected the requisite records. I didn’t have the Dimaond Team go through the data recording process. I was already burying them with a lot of information in a short time.
So, for the next several weeks or months, I’ve taken on an additional task of trainer. But, just like my teenagers who know how to clean a room, eventually, I’ll get to reap the benefits and start leaving my phone at home when I go camping.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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