Early in the beginning stages of the DEC software services I was recruited to work as one of their lead contract workers. As a result I was given a DEC ID badge and acted as an onsite DEC expert having the same resources as a full-time employee of DEC. After 2 years in the program I became one of the top five consultants they offered contracts to.
I had just finished up a project at the Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital where the Pharmacy was unable to print out labels for dispensing medication to children in their wards. I was there for eight weeks and had resolved the issue and then aided them in selection and updating their software so the issue was fixed. My wife and I had decide it was time to return to the Northwest and see family after two years on the road and show off our third baby who was about to be 8 weeks old.
I received a call from a private contracting firm who had connections with the DEC Contract Division about a troublesome client. The firm had offered over 50 people and all had been rejected by the client. They basically begged me to find out what the client wanted in the way of services. I was not looking for work at the time as I was setting up to return home after being on the road for several years and visit with family for several months. I finally agreed to talk with the client over the phone.
The next day I did a phone interview with their client. During the conversation I figured out the issue they were having and explained how to provide a resolution to a piece of it. And for some reason when asked what I thought about the shop my reply was less than candid that day, I suggested that what they had was a sweat-shop environment because of the issue and until it was fixed they would spend a lot of time and money keeping things working.
Well, if you have not figured it out I really did not want the job at the time. I had first quoted them a higher fee than normal for the contract and as well as a fixed starting date. So just to upset the apple cart even more I even add some hand written lines to the contract with some special benefits. Three stick out in my memory, a month off in six months to return home, it would be an extra $5 an hour to carry a cell phone and $5 for a pager. Finally, if they should actually page or call they would be charged a minimal of 2 hours of overtime.
Now, I figured I had priced myself out of the market and would get turned down. But, no the manager insisted that he take no-one but me. Apparently, I so impressed the manager he picked up my resume and called all my former clients and got very glowing reports on my skills. So, I figure at worst I end up delaying our visit for several months so I could solve the client’s issues.
The client’s primary problem was with printing. All the users at this international company could print anything from anywhere and from any computer type. But, the computers would stop queuing to the printers and report errors. A repair tech would be dispatched and reset the printer. Then the systems manager would reset the queue and it would print for a while until the next freeze up. The in house help-desk was spending over 80% of their time on printer calls. They were having over 800 printer related calls a month.
I started by visiting with two of the repair staff and reviewing the help-desk logs. I went on several service calls and saw how they repaired and reset the printers. I sat with the system managers of the two primary systems to figure out how they were fixing the queues. What I found were multiple issues; the number of queues, types of queues, the network settings, and the type of printer language sent. These would change from time to time based on which sending computer and the receiving printer.
So I develop a plan based on my findings, review my findings with the manager and given approval to move forward. The first phase was to collect all the settings used by the computers and printers. The first step was to create a monitor program for the queues on the primary computer systems. Next came several data collection programs for each computer system which was used to create a database. The monitor programs would reset them if they were out of sync with the database. In phase two a network printer data collection program was needed to talk directly to the printers to verify their settings. Finally a daily report to report when any of the printers or queues was out of sync and it could not be reset by the data collection or monitor programs.
After the first month I was able to reduce the number of calls from 800 to 300, then a month later I had them down to 50 and 98% of these were actual hardware failures. Some people hearing this story may think that I fixed their issues with the software I developed but that’s not the case.
Yes, the software fixed the technical issues but I was dealing with an international company, multiple departments, and multiple locations both in the US and Internationally. Since I was making changes to how many of these departments worked it required a major amount of tact and clear understanding of both the people and their cultural background.
There were several times I was able to keep the project on track by understanding a person’s cultural background. I fostered this by listening to what and how things were said. Which allow myself and the staff I was working to deal with others by understanding what their needs were.
An example was we had gained verbal agreement with our counter parts in Japan for a phase of the project. During debriefing from the call I turn to my manager and told him they were never going to do what we asked. He was startled by my statement and just like I told him a month passed and the changes were not done.
The issue was they would “lose face” or to become less respectable to their local management. We simply reworked the how we worded the project so they would be able accept the changes and not “lose face” within their cultural setting. He asked me later how I knew they would not do what we asked. I explained there are three ways to say “Yes” in Japan all based on the tone of voice, I had simply heard the “Never going to happen” tone in their “Yes” that they were simply being polite as their culture required.
The contract continued for over 7 years, I develop several other projects for them and served on several review boards for them for selecting new technologies. During this time I develop web interfaces to each computer platform which would allow staff to reset the queues, created procedures and software to install software for multiple computers to assign printer network connections.
I think my fondest memory of that time was in a hardware sales meeting when my manager was asked how we were saving the company 8 million dollars a year with a staff of 8 by the sales person. He smiled and said, “Well, I have this fellow by the name of Paul Manning…”
Family Stories (Nutty) 