Stumbling Blocks

The planned path for me to switch roles with a colleague in our office has been littered with potholes and speed bumps. I am not sure if this is a sign that this is not something we should be doing or if people are actively working against it.

First, an issue came up last week (and has been lingering on for a few days) that has not been fully resolved. The problem has three or four parts and none of them have kept the customer from working, but due to the nature of them, they have been submitted as high priority cases. The responsible party (who happens to be a competitor...no conflict of interest there) keeps telling the web team "just restart XYZ service", which they do and it always fixes the problem. This of course, is a bandage, not a solution and we are waiting on that competitor to offer up an explanation on why this is happening. Every day something happens on this issue. If I do my job, I am going to have to hand this off to the guy who is switching roles with me and handing off an escalation that is quirky as this one has the potential for chaos. I am not sure how well I will be able to do my primary (new) job if I am being pulled back into the old one.

Next, one of our customers has been having a latency issue with an application at three sites. This customer went to a director and commented on it and that director went to one of the delivery managers (one of his subornidates) and demanded one escalation be opened for EACH site having the issue. In my opinion that is overkill and to be honest, I think that the issue is a known one and a solution is in the works, but our processes dictate that our account managers deal with communicating with our customer account managers. So with that in mind, I informed the account manager on the customer side to contact the account manager on our side to discuss the issue and do a discovery phase. My guess is that if I do not hear anything in a week or so they have come to an agreement without opening an time consuming and expensive escalation. Even if this one does come back, I need to have the colleague whom I am trading roles with run this...less to hand off.

Add to that I still have not learned my colleagues job, not he mine AND his team mate is on vacation this week...no on is getting any training done. I know he is not too pleased about this switch but at least he said he will work with me on it. His choice to take an extra day of vacation concerns me, but I guess he felt the need to get extra time in before the window of opportunity grows smaller.

I keep praying that things will work out in the end for all of us. Too many rumors are floating around about who and what...nothing on when.