First, let me apologize for anyone left hanging after my last post. I’ve had some time to reflect and while it’s very true that a lot is changing for me at work, I’ve decided I’m actually pretty happy about it. So here it is – I’ve been assigned a new customer. This new customer is fairly large and requires a significant amount of handholding. They also use both billing applications supported by our team and use a configuration that I have little to no experience with. In a way, it’s a compliment of sorts that I was picked to take them on because the team leads wanted an experienced person they knew could handle it. However, because the customer can take as much as 20 hours per week, there’s no way I can keep most of my current customers (I have 6).
Here’s where the unfortunate part comes in. I just helped a customer go live at their last 3 hospitals, so transitioning off of their support team now would be very poor timing. We’ll call them customer A. Even though I wouldn’t mind giving them up, I can understand why they would be a poor choice to transition to someone else right now. They are nice people, but kind of a pain to work with because of their strict (read: sometimes blatantly stupid) change control process. Well, I’m stuck with them.
So that leaves 5 other customers that could potentially go to someone else but the way the team leads saw it, there was only one logical choice. Keep the customer mentioned above and the customer that takes the least amount of time. We’ll call the latter customer B. Of course customer B is my least favorite group out of all 6 of them. Needless to say, when I heard this, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I asked if I had a choice in which customers to keep and was basically told I could keep customer B or the next closest in amount of time spent at another 2.5 hours per week. We’ll call them customer C and this group just happens to be a group I like.
So there was my only real choice in all the changes coming my way – take less time with a customer I don’t like (B), or more time with a customer I enjoy working with (C). Out of 5 transitions in my future, it didn’t seem like much of a choice. On top of that, one of the customers I haven’t mentioned yet happens to be my favorite and it seemed pretty clear I couldn’t keep them. After talking it over with Amber, I decided to go with C, suck up the time difference, and be rid of B within a month or two. The only thing that really hung me up was the idea that I’d been given the opportunity to drop my customer load as much as possible and I was considering passing it up. In the end, Amber and I decided I’d probably be happier with customer C even if it was more time consuming.
After a few days as things started to sink in I decided that this really isn’t a bad thing except for the unfortunate part about losing my favorite customer. I was already thinking some sort of change would be nice around my 3 year anniversary (next week), I just wasn’t thinking it would be this major. Most of my current customers are going to newer people, so the transitions may not be a cakewalk. Finally, there’s only 6 more days to complete the transition that kicked this all off. The next few weeks are going to be super busy, but I’m excited about what work will be like once I’m actually down to 3 customers. Time will tell.