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J.R. Snyder Jr.
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I worked with the external marketing geniuses and MBA's that took over U S WEST in 1992. They started the disastrous re-engineering project the Wall Street Journal just wrote about. The Journal says that event was the beginning of the end and what will sooner, rather than later, sink Qwest.
I know the Bell System, with the advent of technology and consumer demands, couldn't have remained the way it was. I questioned from the beginning though, the way it was broken up. Judge Green tinkered with something essential in our economy. Telecom was as crucial as the rest of our infrastructure: highways, water systems, electricity, and so on. Knowing I had no control I took a 'wait and see' stance and began to believe he had a good plan until July 7, 1994.
These newly minted 1992 telecom gurus who hatched the ill conceived re-engineering plan, euphemistically titled "Transformation", had decided the way to go was to follow AT&T's bad example of centralization. They intended, IN 18 months, to consolidate 256 smaller centers into 10 "megacenters" and have Customer Service Reps (who are literate to this day only in one thing: taking an order and selling) be "one stop shopping" contacts for repair, sales, collections, billing and you name it.
I was on corporate staff as a Training Manager and Method and Process writer. I was ordered to head the new Learning, Education and Development Team, otherwise known as LEAD. It was a bad promotion that made my stomach sink when I was told to do it. We'd train the Service Reps to answer complex repair calls and conduct fundamental testing, then dispatch those repair calls from the Business Office. The intention was to lay people off, of course, and in fact many were, namely all of our repair staff in the test centers.
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- No system upgrades took place, however, and it later confirmed my opinion that most business office people are good at nothing but selling. They never could put in a service order correctly at Mountain Bell, which still haunted U S WEST. Over 50% of our test center problems were service order errors. What could make these people change? Overnight? Any attempt to reason with them led to a lot of people being fired. So I soldiered on.
Our first megacenter conversion began in Denver in May of 1994 and in spite of 18 months of preparation, Network staff and Systems staff were holding their breath and had a sense of pending doom. This was our life and livelihood that was being messed with yet we had no control and could only pray at this point. They started converting the first of 32 centers in Colorado to Denver and by the middle of June we knew both the Service Reps being trained weren't "getting it" and our patched together computer systems were teetering under the strain of too much, too soon. On July 7, 1994 I walked across the street from the Embassy Suites hotel into the building and sensed something was wrong. By the time I got off the elevator on the 34th floor, which was the floor I was in charge of, I knew that it was disaster.
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- When I walked in the center, I was greeted by a couple of dozen silent managers staring at me. The entire system had crashed. I also knew the LEAD team and the Systems team was going to be blamed for the whole thing . . .
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- Editor's Note: A regulated telco can lose serious money if customer service declines . . .
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From the Colorado Public Utilities Commission:
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Rule 21.2.4 of the Rules requires U S WEST to acknowledge calls directed to its published telephone numbers for repair service or the business offices within 20 seconds and to answer such calls by an operator or other employee within 40 seconds for 85 percent of all such calls. . . Rule 22.2 of the Rules requires U S WEST to clear 85 percent of all out-of-service reports during any three month period within 24 hours. . .
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- Possible remedies include, but are not limited to: (1) an order to cease and desist; (2) an order that amends or revokes, wholly or in part, U S WEST's certificate of public convenience and necessity; (3) an order that reduces the rates of the Company; (4) an order that refunds previously collected revenue; (5) an order that contains a combination of the foregoing remedial actions; and/or (6) any other corrective or remedial action which the Commission deems appropriate.
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- Colorado Public Utilities Commission Decision No. C94-1475) November 9, 1994
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No Coloradocustomer got a service order or repair for an entire week. Many things unfolded after that, all kinds of you-know-what was hurled and flung across the ranks. The systems were patched again and the plan went ahead half baked. Salt Lake City was next and I took the career risking move of refusing to go; I let my staff decide what they wanted to do. Half of us stayed in Denver, the other half went to corporate headquarters in the suburb. Salt Lake local management did a smart thing, what I think is rooted in their independent Mormon culture. They consolidated the centers but didn't cross-train anyone and kept them doing their same job function. They told Denver they had followed The Plan. Well, sorta.
Some of my staff were from Utah so I knew the management style of the state. I knew what they had done and being a Phoenix person, I joined with a rebellion hatched by 90% of the management in Arizona. The VP of the State (who was fired over this) told Denver that Arizona wasn't going to do anything except consider what Utah had really done, not what they said they did. The Fight Was On. It was horrible and a lot of people were hurt, I was even fired for 24 hours. Eventually a truce was negotiated and from November 1st to December 31st what was called "The Pause" occurred. All plans were temporarily halted while high level managers and executives retreated to some place in Wyoming and figured out what to do. We just waited.
What came out of it was just another half baked plan, but still better than the previous one. Like Lady MacBeth, "what was done couldn't be undone." Not totally anyway, tens of thousands of people had lost their jobs and weren't coming back and their knowledge of working around the systems was gone. So we forged ahead and by September of 1995 I talked to a friend of mine in Minnesota who put me in touch with a VP in Public Services.
Public Services was a miscellaneous collection of services ranging from pay phones to telecards to PSAP support. It was removed from the re-engineering process. The VP hired me as an Operations Manager of a money and bill payment processing production center that needed some help with labor problems. So I took a step backwards, for my own health, on 09-05-1995 and basically went underground in the company. Unfortunately, 18 months later the same meddling wonks I dealt with before descended upon Public Services and the VP I knew was forced into retirement. After two months I resigned and took a cash payout.
I worked for Lucent in Tucson for a while and saw they were also crashing and burning. So I took an offer to go back to U S WEST as a Director of Training for a ridiculous amount of money on an 18 month project to transition to Qwest. That's an even longer disaster story. When that was done in 2000 I decided that I still loved telecom but didn't like what the business had become. It was fortuitous because right about then came the telecom crash.
So that's how is I decided to just go for "the job" in the second half of my life and to hell with "the career."
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- Many, many more related pages! Click for a list. Information on J.R. Snyder Jr., operators, directory assistance working and history, placing toll calls and so on. Great reading.
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