At&t Mobility

AT&T Mobility

Kevin Melvin is a manager at AT&T's Mobility office in Atlanta. He has served with the company for five years, and has seen the recent transition to using contractors in India to manage the workload of their technical maintenance jobs on AT&T's 17,000 servers. This transition is still very new for the company, because it has only been going on for the past year or so. Kevin shared that one of the most difficult things about India is that the time difference is 12 hours, so it is difficult to assist in resolving technical issues over the phone. Another issue is that the leaders of the workforce in India will never say no to a job. Even if the job is beyond their technical skills, the people in India will not turn down a job. This is a cultural norm that the stateside workers have had to adjust. Kevin described that this is causing a lot of pushback from his employee's because his team is coming in to work having to clean up the mess that the workforce on the other side of the globe has messed up. Finally they struggle to communicate because of the time difference. Kevin says there is rarely a phone conversation and most communication happens over their internal chat system (QMessenger). There are many ways that the system can be improved, and Kevin hopes that many of these setbacks will be resolved in the months to follow. apple, cat, dog, frog, cow, horse, pig, really. These are just words to meet the word limit.

References:

Melvin, Kevin. Personal interview. 28 July 2011.