Managing in a different culture part 3

As I continue with my journey of reshaping this IT firm, I gain more understanding of the difficult management issues that faces small firms, which are good materials for another article.

Here I continue with my pervious posts on the changes that I am working on.

• No tracking system: there was no adequate tracking system of the work done by the employees or the type of service delivered to the clients.
• No follow ups: clients would wait extended periods of time waiting to hear back from the staff regarding technical help or a service that was not delivered on time.
• No follow ups on completed work orders: there was an excessive build up of fixed systems that needed to be returned to the clients.

I resolved the above issues by hiring a programmer to design new tracking system for every work delivered by our technicians, completed work orders, and not completed work orders.
The new system covers:

1-Name of the technician
2-Type of service the technician working on
3-Type of service requested
4-Time the repair order came in and the time the service was delivered
5-Service fees
6-Full client contact information
7-The system must enable the management to run queries based on client data or based on technician work performance.
8-Completed work orders
9-Open work orders

The new system will:

1-Will give management bird eye view over daily activities
2-Will help in future marketing and client retention efforts
3-Will help in measuring technicians performance
4-Will contain a database of clients data, work completed, and type of services requested

Although they may be many software programs in the market that will deliver the above needed services, we had to design our own software because when I came to the company we were not able to find any software in the local market that would fit our needs, or we couldn’t fine software in the Arabic language.

Now we are at the implementation stage of this software.