John Linton
A four day weekend at the end of the year followed after three working days by a three day weekend is a pleasant way of ending the year especially when Christmas Day falls on a Saturday. I suppose the downside is the shortest 'working week' in the year is available for all of the things you let slide leading up to Christmas....which, when I reviewed my 'to do list' this morning was a lot more than I thought.
This year was the first year that we had support and sales telephone and email and ticket answering services on Christmas Day and Boxing day as well as the intervening week end days and we have been recruiting in December to extend the weekend shifts to the full 8.30 am to 9.30 pm hours seven days a week which we will put in place before the end of January 2010 assuming everything goes to plan. All being well, we will extend support hours to 24 x 7 before the end of June 2010 as we move to providing a different range of services utilising Sri Lankan engineering personnel. We have never considered that ADSL residential users needed 24 x 7 service but as we will need 24 x 7 for other services it makes sense to offer that to ADSL users as well.
The main tasks to be completed over the next few days are the revisions to the business ADSL plan, the revisions to the wireless broadband plans and a re-look at the residential ADSL2 plans - plus agreeing the new business remuneration and commission plans and implementing the new caching services. We will also do some interviewing to hire the first 4 business sales trainees for January as well as tidying up some other personnel management and measurement issues. It doesn't sound that much when you spell it out in a sentence or two but there is a fair bit of work to be done in relatively few hours. Apart from the odd year or two, once a decade on average, I have always used the second half of December to ensure whatever I have been responsible for is as well prepared as it could be for the start of the new calendar year. I have noticed over a very long time that few people avail themselves of this time to work sensibly and I have always regarded that as a significant waste of opportunity....each to their own I suppose.
There are obviously more people than me who regard the last two weeks of December as being useful times to catch up with people who are difficult to reach at other times and I have received a 'deluge' of emails containing product and service offers and requests for meetings this week over the past 10 days. Apart from interviewing prospective sales trainees I have two appointments on each of the next three days and two conference phone calls to discuss 'opportunities'. Perhaps it's also a sign that business is tougher for some people at the moment than it has been in previous years though our December ADSL1 and ADSL2 sales will be up on December 2008 by over 20% and the combined ADSL1, ADSL2 and Wireless broadband sales will be up more than 50% on 2008 - so the likely toughness of the marketplaces isn't yet showing up in our figures.....but then I didn't expect the numbers to drop just yet....the first few months of 2010 may well be a totally different story when the current round of 'price adjustments' by the larger ISPs don't produce the required results and they start on round 2 of that unwinnable war for an increased residential ADSL market share.
The engineers and provisioning have a 'big' six months ahead of them re-dimensioning the network to match the changed objectives of the company and the delivery of new services in new areas and we have an equally challenging time in finding the right way of delivering wireless services as well as changing the emphasis on marketplaces to deliver very ambitious growth while ensuring our current customers continue to benefit from the likely downward movements in pricing across a range of services and products. I think the rush to offering unlimited residential ADSL2 (and perhaps ADSL1) will be an interesting process to watch unfold over the next three months.
Time to hit the road and make something happen.
PS: I am considering making this blog only accessible from Exetel IP ranges as it is primarily aimed at Exetel customers and it seems around the right time to do that. My main reason for making that change is that I'm unsure how much time I will have from now onwards to write a daily blog as I will switch my recording of the ups and downs of playing my part in running Exetel to a different medium which I think will be more useful in achieving the objectives that the blog methodology has partially achieved over the past year or so.