Monday, October 28, 2019

Gratitude Monday: getting it done


Comparisons are odious, but I’m going to make one anyhow. At my previous employer, nothing happened in a timely fashion. Unless your time scale is geological.

One example: I sent our CLO an almost entirely-boilerplate non-disclosure agreement (the boilerplate being hers, with the addition only of vendor names and brief insertions relating to the statement of work) for approval. Two weeks passed, with multiple emails and voicemails to her; I was just about to stand in her office door when she called to say she saw “nothing wrong” with it.

I get it—she’s both CLO and CFO; she has a lot on her plate. But that makes her a bottleneck in some very important areas, and two weeks for any kind of response is just beyond the beyond.

But it’s symptomatic of an organizational culture that sees no reason to rush about anything. And it explains its lack of appetite for innovation of any sort. (Also contributes to the mindset of my ex-colleague’s “oh, there’s no point in setting deadlines; we never meet them.”)

Well, those people and that mindset wouldn’t make it past the first 45 minutes at my current company. I’m copied on emails about bugs and customer issues; there are at least ten to 20 of those a day. And they get immediate attention—the engineering director looks at the issue and responds; it’s either fixed or it’s put in the backlog. Some of the more complicated issues generate long email threads between engineering, product management, customer support and others. They take this stuff seriously.

And somehow they’ve inspired me to do the same. I have to say that it’s annoying as spit to have your train of thought interrupted by some customer who can’t log in to the portal or has found a bug. But that’s part of the job—the job I love.

Wednesday, we got an email from a sales engineer in Europe who used to have full access to the portal, but now doesn’t, and he had to give a customer demo today, which requires all bells and whistles. We figured out that he has two types of account profiles—the one that used to give him full access and the one that doesn’t, which now appears to be the operating account. I hesitated to authorize a third account, while the other two are swirling about, but: customer demo.

Eventually we logged the issue (which I’ve found in some other accounts) and I sent an email to the provisioning group to give the guy specific access entitlements. I didn’t hear anything back on Thursday, and by Friday I was getting worried. Around 1700 I IM’d the engineering director to ask if the Service Desk works over the weekend, because the SE needs access. He wasn’t sure, but suggested I could call their number and get someone to provision while I was on the phone.

I did that and Service Desk did it (guy said they were going to get to it that day anyhow, but I’d marked my Wednesday request high importance and used the word urgent in the text; I am not really impressed with their understanding of urgent) and I emailed the SE asking him to check over the weekend that he had full access; if he had any problems, I’d check emails and get on it. Well, he emailed me on Saturday to say everything was fine, and I did a happy dance.

I swear I have never been so excited about a customer demo in my career.

And I am grateful to be working in an organization that is both mission-driven and gets stuck in to get things done.



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