John Linton
........can't be any worse than coping with other aspects of the Australian communications industry.
In an hour or so Annette and I will leave to fly to Sri Lanka for the quarterly review of the Exetel operations in Colombo. We first went to Sri Lanka at about this time in 2008 to begin the process of setting up a full scale operation and to hire two more 'work from home' residential support engineers to add to the two we had had since February 2006. (we also were hoping to meet Sir Arthur C Clarke and get a book signed for Steve who is an avid fan of the great man).
Since that first visit, during which we somehow managed to get all of the basics of setting up a new company in a very difficult location put in place as well as meeting Sir Clarke (as he is referred to in Sri Lanka) in his hospital suite where he died a week or so later, we have returned to Colombo for a few days each quarter to formally review progress and to get a 'feel' for what is actually happening in the country, the city and our tiny operation there. Like the Australian company, it has been interesting to see the development from the bare floor space we looked at on our first visit with our first four SL personnel still working from home in February 2004 and remembering the almost incredible frustrations of dealing with the many government, legal, accounting, fit out, banking, telecommunications, real estate and otherĀ personnel 'long distance' between our first and second visit in May to get the company established.
Over the two years that have elapsed since our first visit we have come a very, very long way thanks to more than a few of Exetel's Australian personnel who have gone to Colombo on specific knowledge transfer programs and for the three longer term assignnees who have spent 6 - 12 months at a timeĀ to ensure the daily operating procedures and processes are successfully put in place. We now have 45 full time personnel in Colombo with a locally hired general manager and a bigger office than we have in North Sydney.
This will be our eighth trip to Colombo in the last two years in which we have seen the bare concrete floor space become a sophisticated 365 day a year communications centre staffed by very highly skilled personnel. We have achieved much more by offering services from Colombo that we ever could in Australia simply because we can afford to hire the number of people required to provide the additional services and keep to our objective of offering the lowest priced services in Australia (any service provided at no more than one dollar profit per month).
Our principal objectives for this trip are to put in place more sophisticated QOS measurements for the different call types and to ensure that the continuing 'mechanical' improvements to call wait times, call talk times and call abandon times remain on track to allow an increase in weekend coverage hours and that the 'platform' is in place to move the operation to a 24 x 7 x 365 in the FY2011 year. Many things need to be done/improved before that can happen and it will be interesting to see what has been accomplished since we were last there in November. Steve wasn't very pleased with what he saw when he was in Colombo last month to participate in the formal setting up of the Model Dairy Farm Project so my expectations are not high.
A minor thing that we have to do is to decide on how we deal with the space issues. Although we added about a third more space last July there is now no real room for much more growth. This is mainly due to our decision not to use the 'hot desking' principal of the majority of multi shift call centres but to provide a dedicated work station per employee. It is also due to our decision to use 'professional' standard work space size and free space per employee ratios that are almost never used in call centres anywhere in the world that I have seen them and certainly not in Sri Lanka where the original fit out people two years ago suggested that we could get "at least twice as many work stations in to the floor space". I am reluctant to move the operation to another floor/another building even but we will make that decision next week.
It will also be interesting to gauge the level of 'tension' on the streets of Colombo after the brief euphoria of bringing the decades long civil war to an end only to face a military coup following the arrest of the popular (at least with the troops) leader of the opposition.