Interesting Decisions at Work

Come on, we all have employers that make them...

So I was feeling pretty good, thinking "Fuck yes, the router installs for all of OPSM NZ will start soon, and I'll be busy as fuck!" When I got a response from the project manager that now leads me to believe I'll be far fucking busier than need be and it may be a bit of a headache. xD Still looking forward to it, but instead of starting at the top of NZ and working our way down in an orderly fashion from town to town so I can use my own transportation and they just have to pay travel and accomodation, I've been told "Yes, that's a good idea, but I'm not in control of the scheduling for the stores. Will let you know what happens." Okay, cool, so basically "That's a great idea, but you'll probably be back and forth from random city to random city probably with air fare and expensive rental due to you being under 25 which may make you completely unviable for some of the away jobs, forcing us to go back to that idiot Jason and his worthless techs whose stores you've been fixing since you arrived in NZ."

Sweet.... Well, I guess at least it means the contract will take longer and I'll (hopefully) get paid more than I would otherwise....

But seriously, project management, dafuq? Why we no do things sensibly?!

Haha sounds like fun

i know the feeling mate, sometimes its not easy getting through to the manager, they dont want to listen to others, or they listen but dont want to do it that way even though its easier lol

It's not the manager, it's the client. xD The manager and I go way back, he's the one that sacked my old boss after we had a falling out and hired me direct instead of keeping me as a sub-contractor. To be fair though, my ex-employer had a tendency to try and force people to do things his way and had a ridiculously high revisit rate so they were already looking to replace him, but didn't have a viable alternative as yet. xD

You see, there's about 3 project managers per project. One is ours, one is the clients, and one is some fucker that needs to back off and let the people that know what they're doing do it instead of forcing his way onto them. xD

But then again, we get this all the time in IT... xD They hire us coz we know what we're doing, then insist on doing it their way when we advise against it. *shrug*

The problem is that even though there's a certain way it should be done to maximise efficiency and keep costs down, the guy sitting up the top giving orders is looking at the bottom line going "But this store gets us lots of money, so it's most important and has to be done first, even though it's isolated. And next will be the one at the other end of the country, then come back down this side again. Kthx."

So, I did some quick Sunny Day Scenario calculations in my head (those days where everything goes smoothly with very few complications at work - i.e any router install I'm on) and we're looking at about 100 OPSM's in NZ. So let's assume they all get the upgrade. I can do one in 1h (accounting for reprogramming it up to 3 times) and a total of one hours travel between sites. This means 4 a day during their normal trading hours, 7 days a week. 28 routers a week installed.

If we did it my way, I could do the entirety of the NZ stores by myself within a month. And given the fact that I did 80% of the router installs in QLD, Australia, last year, and trained the guys that did the rest, that means I've done about 40 of them before. There's never once been a revisit to any of my sites, so you can write off any after-project revisit costs. Hell, I've installed routers before they even had the connection running to it, so no means of testing it, and they still came out perfect. It's not rocket science.

It just doesn't make sense to do it any other way.... The other crowd they used to go through in NZ had an average of 5 revisits per site. I mean, come on. The only way they could be that bad was if they were deliberately setting up for revisits.

Can I ask who you work for?

IMI-Solutions pty ltd, but I've also been luxottica's (opsm, sunglass hut) lead technician for over a year now.