John Linton Annette and I will go to Sri Lanka later this morning to do the three month progress reviews and to finalise the planning for the new financial year for the Sri Lankan company. It remains an 'inconvenient' trip due to lack of suitable connecting flights from Singapore, KL, or Bangkok which means there is little option but to overnight at one of those cities and get a very early morning flight the next day. Alternateively you could look on the bright side and say it gives you the opportunity of a few hours in a different city to break the trip....which is easier to do the first few times but now it seems more like needing to travel for three days to do four days work.
There is a plus about these long travel times, at least for me, in that it gives a chance to catch up on lost sleep as, for whatever reason, I fall asleep almost as soon as a plane takes off and as there is no internet on international flights at the moment I have nothing to distract me so flying to and from Sri Lanka I normally sleep the whole way.
We have made considerable progress since we there 12 months ago signing the lease for the floor space and the fit out and finalising the Board Of Investment agreements and various other statutory obligations. We now have 20 full time employees and two interns and a Sri Lankan general manager and have moved Level 1 andLevel 2 support, provisioning of all services, residential sales and some pogramming functions to Colombo. It has also allowed us to offer 7 day a week support for residential users as well as extended support hours up to 10 pm at night.
So many positive things have been accomplished.
We have along way to go to bring the level of 'immediate' support knowledge up to the level it was in Australia prior to the move but that will be accomplished over time and is the principle goal for the coming year. How we accomplish that will be the subject of several days of detailed discussions next week along with the other reviews of individual personnel development and how we continue to expand the scope and size of the SL operations.
It was a very 'brave' decison for a tiny company like Exetel and we did it differently to the recommendtions of several 'experts' we discussed the process with and certainly ignore the advice of Austrade in settling on Sri Lanka rather than India, the Philippines or even Singapore or Malaysia which they deemed far more suitable. They even suggested that Bulgaria would be a better choice. However we did our own 'research' and have not regretted selecting Sri Lanka in terms of a country or the people and we have managed to cope with effects of the civil war in the North of the country so far (touch wood) though even someone as blase as I am feels some sort of trepidation landing and taking off from Colombo's airport.
We have got to put more effort in to many aspects of the work we do in Colombo and will, almost certainly, need to continue to send Australian 'advisors' to the Colombo office for at least the remainder of 2009 and probably well in to 2010 depending upon what we decide over the next few days. Having said that we will also need to make some decisions on what, if any 'outside work' the SL company can undertake over the coming months/year to provide more development opportunities for the current and future employees.
I have had several casual enquiries aout providing services to other Australian companies (which, quite frankly, surprised me) and two more 'solid' enquiries from NZ companies, both small ISPs in that country. We are not ready to do that right now but we should be able, and have plans, to do that from around early 2010 if every thing works out well. It will be interesting to see how that develops later this year.
I remain surprised at the fact that we still get the occasional 'complaint' from residential customers that we shouldn't 'export Aussie jobs" to a "pack of Indians who have terrible language skills". I find those comments surprising in two ways. Firstly that they are made at all in the 21st century when no Australian buys much Australian made goods or services with the possible exception of fresh food. Secondly, I am surprised at the 'language skill' comment because, as someone who has been part of much of the hiring process and remains very much a part of the personnel review process, the English language skills are at least as good as the engineers who used to provide engineering support in Australia and are certainly far superior to the 'English language skills' ( not to mention the education standard and good manners) of the people in Australia who complain about the language abilities of the SL personnel.
I would think, over time, that those two minor issues will 'disappear' if only because xenophobic people will not select Exetel as their supplier and the people who complain about not being able to understand what is said to them by SL personnel will eventually improve their own English language skills which, judging from their ability to use English to write emails is well below what an Australian resident should aspire to....and yes, I understand, that they are seldom born in or even went to school in Australia....but.