Saturday, September 26, 2009

Training

Well I am in the full swing of things in regards to training. My first day was from 4:30 pm until 7:15 am the next day. My second day was from 8:30 pm until 7:00am the next day. The hours suck but I feel the content is still important. I am getting enough sleep but not much else. My sleep schedule is also a complete mess because of the hours worked and such. I am eating 1 meal a day by choice which is confusing me and I usually only eat about half of that meal but I am feeling pretty good.

I am not nearly so nervous this time around. It is the weekend here approach 3 am on Sunday. I slept most of Saturday after I got back. I plan to go to sleep in a few hours then get up and finish my training modules off for the week.

I have done more reading in my free time than anything else as the internet connection here sucks. I usually can't get any more than 5k and it is barely that.

I am really looking forward to the end of the week when I am going to get to go to Jaipur. I just have to survive all of the trainings until then. The agents definitely need the help. I can't believe all of the bad practices agents have gotten into and the things that "always" resolve their calls...but they aren't. Like deleting the Cache(eh).db file; this is the cure to all evils. Sigh.

I continue to struggle with the why of my work. In so many ways my job is setup for failure and yet I stay and persist. Maybe someday I will understand that self destructive behavior.

I am forming a new opinion about how things should be done though this time around. It is obvious that regardless of the amount of training people are going to do what they think will work best. In the case of how agents are handling cases there they are doing things like deleting the cache.db file because it worked really well in this one certain circumstance. I feel like we should be spending less time going over individual case issues and find the root cause to things like this and then driving a solution. I mean think about it. Agent spend all of this time creating this ideas about how to quickly fix issues and actually start creating a lot of extra work for themselves. Why don't we have someone to look into the broader issues and drive down the root cause of agents misconceptions and issues. In a way that is the root concept behind my current job but somehow people seem to think that magically knowledge will come from an escalation. When even if it does you have to generate significant volume behind an issue to get any real action taken. Which is very hard to do of of a single issue, and finding a broader view on the issue requires time and research. Sigh again.

Wow there is a bit of my brain directly dumped to the screen. For those who know me well have fun. For those who don't...well I am sorry that I may be worrying you. My drive to care about my job is continuing to build in the middle of all of this though. Can someone explain that to me? I don't understand it.

You would think in the middle of this chaos I would feel like all of my efforts are for not as the installation training was probably some of the best training we put out and obviously it failed...which means I failed...which is why I am back. I guess trying to fix the problems that have already occurred. The funny thing is I am feeling like it really wasn't the material that was the problem it was the context of the training as a whole. The problem I originally presented that you can not expect and agent to be able to troubleshoot all products in 1 month seems to be the real root cause. Although I completely agree the perhaps a new approach to the training module needs to be tried. I will spend today and tomorrow trying to make that exact thing happen. I will find a way to make it a better experience for the agents and help them to truely understand.

Sorin out.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Planes again

Well I am back in India. I arrived about 1 hour ago. I got a little more sleep on the plane but I am still very tired. I will be taking a nap soon after I eat some food. It seems I left my battery for my camera in Seattle. I need to figure out how to either get it to Aanchal before she leaves or buy one.

I will be using this blog to update people again during my stay. Happy reading.

Sorin