John Linton
….. as George Peppard (as Hannibal Smith) used to say in an early 1980s TV show – “The A-Team."
We arrived in Colombo around midday yesterday and had a surprisingly quick and non-hair raising drive from the airport to the hotel due to the lack of traffic (a trip that on the two previous occasions took well over an hour this time barely exceeded 30 minutes). Undoubtedly this must have been due to the very ‘executive’ hour of the flight from Singapore which instead of meaning we had to place a wake up call for 4.30 am allowed us to take off on a newly scheduled flight at 10.30 am.
The World Trade Centre where our offices are located is right next to the hotel and is an undercover few minute walk from the hotel lobby (a major plus as we later walked back to the hotel in a torrential tropical down pour). Annette (and I) were very pleased that the offices both looked really good and functioned so well – they look exactly as the ‘computer simulation’ that was done on our last visit only better 'in real life' and the view is great. Everything is so much better here than in our North Sydney offices.
We tested the telephone services (both incoming and outgoing) on a 1 mbps x 1 mbps VoIP link to and from the VoIP PBX in the North Sydney office and the separate data link via another carrier to the North Sydney and Sydney CBD data base and other servers and they were fine – as you would expect in this day and age.
The shifts in Colombo now run from 8.30 am to 10.30 pm (Eastern Summer Time with 6 people on each shift at the moment) from Monday to Friday (including all public holidays). The weekend shifts run from 1.30 pm to 10.30 pm on both Saturday and Sunday. Our new employees (the ones we have never met as James Dover did the interviewing and hiring over the past three months here) are nice people with good education and work backgrounds and the great personalities and manners that seem inherent in a Buddhist upbringing and culture.
It seems a long time ago that Steve and I first discussed how to address the issues of providing 24 x 7 x 365 support services without going down the paths we observed other ISPs in Australia following – in fact, to the best of my recollection it was getting on for 8 years ago – well before the time we created Exetel.
It’s even a little over three years ago that we ‘decided’ to commence a program of providing the support that couldn’t be done via automation from a more cost effective country than Australia. Our first two Sri Lankan engineers who worked from their homes until we opened the Colombo office came to Australia in March 2006 for 4 weeks of training and have been part of Exetel’s support processes ever since that time.
This was the start of this ambitious project of moving all of Exetel’s customer support, service provisioning, accounting and a large part of our data base and other programming from North Sydney to Colombo. The Colombo offices have now been operational for three months and, with the exception of some expected and a couple of unexpected ‘teething problems’ are achieving everything our ambitious plans aimed at.
So, our first half day back in Sri Lanka has been a very pleasant time with no ‘surprises’ and no real disappointments which, given the difficulties and magnitude of the tasks that have been so ably accomplished, is a very satisfying, and in many ways quite impressive, achievement and James Dover, particularly, can be very proud of what he has accomplished so far.
So far…….
There is a great deal still to be done and it will be many months before the skills and knowledge transfers are completed and the full management of the Sri Lankan company is put in place on a long term, ongoing basis. This is planned to happen by December 31st 2009 but there are no ‘cut and dried’ dates as so much will depend on so many things that are not either currently under our control and, almost certainly, things that are currently completely unknown to us.
So, as WSC once said, “Not the end, not even the beginning of the end – but perhaps, the end of the beginning”. As with every aspect of commercial life the real issue is never that you can do something very well today - it's how well can you keep doing it, or more accurately keep getting it done, on an ongoing basis into the distant future with constant personnel changes - that's quite another completely different set of challenges all together.
Briefly, because that's all it can ever be, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel on how we had actually made all this happen and, very briefly, I had one of those, few, ‘warm glow’ moments in commercial life when I actually felt really proud and happy about being part of something that was being done very, very well and was quite special.