There seems to be this theory at work that “Tech I”s will do nothing but monitoring all day every day. I don’t think I’ve ever done that here. This means, when a supervisor or program manager, or even the department head asks me, “On average, what percentage of your day is spent on [customer]?” I can’t answer truthfully.
There are days where I don’t even monitor them. There are days where I only monitor and handle emergencies. There are days when I spend all day on them. Because I cannot dedicate my day to the customer, I will never “finish” their alarms, nor will I ever be “caught up.” I simply cannot get them a valid answer to the question.
Without an answer to that question, I cannot answer their next question. (Note: Today is not the first time they have asked me this series of questions.) “If you were able to monitor the alarms using [new software], how much faster do you think you could do the same number of alarms?” No baseline, no way to compare to other customers. Really. Can’t answer that question.
So they come up with other questions to ask that will eventually lead them to an answer, but as I said, I can’t give them percentages or hours of improved times because I SIMPLY DO NOT SPEND ALL DAY DOING JUST ALARMS.
I explained to them how quickly I caught up with another customer using Alarm Pro 1.1 when that account was handed to me a couple weeks ago. I spent 6 hours catching up on 400 alarms, 150 of which were valid, the rest junk. Now I spend 20 minutes a day maintaining that small list. But, as I never touched that customer before Alarm Pro 1.1, the information is not valid.
Those 400 alarms, though, would be around 12000 if listed using the software I do now for the customer they’re interested in. If I get 300 alarms a week for one issue, they’re listed as 300 alarms in this software. in [new software], they would be listed as one. I would have to go through one alarm instead of 300. They think this information is also not valid.
They asked me to come up with an estimate based on switching from Alarm Pro 1.0 to Alarm Pro 1.1. At the time we switched, I was not monitoring anyone using Alarm Pro because the accounts became defunct. I had nothing to compare. The continued to pressure me for an estimate, throwing out percentages as if it would prompt me to say something.
“Do you want me to just make up a number? I don’t really have data to compare. Switching [customer] to Alarm Pro 1.1 would be a definite improvement, no matter what, but I really can’t give you any guesses as to how much it would be considering how different the process would become.”
They gave up after that.
Seriously. Nothing to compare to. Not going to make up numbers here.