At WPNI, I’m part of a team that essentially serves as the front-end to our technology department. When people in the company (or at the Post, for that matter) have a technology-related issue they call our number and we either solve the issue if it’s something simple — a user can’t print, someone needs help with a conference room projector, that sort of thing — or we escalate issues to the appropriate department; i.e. a server is down, a component of the website isn’t working properly, and so on.
Ordinarily, I’m not actually involved in these kinds of calls directly, as I’m more or less dedicated to servicing Express. I do interact with the other team members, and I go to meetings and receive updates on issues facing our group and the department as a whole, as a rule I haven’t been manning the phones directly for the company.
Recently, however, the team member who covers the Sunday shift moved from Sunday – Thursday to Monday – Friday as part of a move that puts him in a higher escalation tier within our own group. Since I already work the same schedule, I’ve been asked to more or less take his place on the Sunday shift, which means I’ll now be answering calls from the news desk — and anybody else who happens to be in Sundays — as well as handing issues for Express. (Express remains my main priority, so if there’s a conflict I’m charged with making calls as necessary to obtain additional support resources.)
Now, if this had happened at my previous job I’d have been very upset, but in this case I’m not for several reasons. For one thing, unlike before I have a number of people who I can call for additional support — all of the sub-groups in the tech department have their own on-call personnel, and I’m also free to call on our own on-call for support if things get busy or complicated.
More importantly, it’s been weighing somewhat on me over the past few months that, while I enjoy working with my team members, I don’t really get enough of a sense of how the company operates as a whole since I’m usually focused on a small segment of it, and that as a result I sometimes feel that I’m not contributing in the same fashion as the rest of the team. I’m hoping that this move will broaden my exposure to the rest of WPNI ’s employees and technology and make me a more useful asset to both.
So far, so good. Today I helped a user restore Word functionality by clearing the default template, worked with our content-management group on article placement issues in the site search, contacted another group regarding a server monitor alarm, and talked to Gene Weingarten on the phone. In every case, I learned something new about how our company works that I didn’t know before. Maybe I should have done this a long time ago?
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