Overall it was exciting to work for that big of a portfolio . I had to work 12 hour days starting from 9 to 9 but enjoyed the management work. Rollout was going on but I was involved in a very limited manner. Mr.Raghunath and Mr.Kumar were managing the rollout.
I created lot of new process and preventive maintenance procedures referring to the bible written by Mr.Jacob Mathew,GM ESCOTEL.
Ravikumar was the switch Asst.Manager and he was very friendly to me and I always had full switch support for any activities. RF Department was reporting partially to me and to V.Kumar.
We had a get together with all the engineers, Mr.Pritam, Mr.Pandian, Mr.Sridhar and Mr.Raghu at a hill resort near Salem for 2 days and it was fun.
I used to go for cluster visits , which includes all the places in TN where we have coverage inlcluding Pondicherry. I used to have bimonthly meeting with the cluster engineers in their respective place and visit couple of their sites for quality assurance. I always enjoyed the stay in Pondicherry, Annamalai (5star) hotel and the nice fish fry there. The travel to pondicherry was tight 7 hours in the tata estate. Ganeshan was my trusted driver who accompanies me to all the places I visit. He was the best driver I ever had.
My works and management skills started getting known slowly and I became part of the executive committee Team in TN. So I used to attend the weekly meetings involving the COO and Sales heads. But I was not getting a very good exposure on the project side and hence was not involved in big Chennai meetings. But I had nothing to complain as I was enjoying my management career and used to hold weekly conference calls with my 15 engineers.
And then came the moment in which Pritam the CTO asked me to step into the project manager role to assist Mr.Raghunaath. I had a concern that I have to do this role by letting my BSS role, to which Pritam said to handle both. So finally I started managing Project Rollout of TN , rolling out 400 sites in 5-6 months along with handling my BSS role. During this time the management changed in chennai , new CTO was Mr.Sugumaran and Mr.Pandian was overlooking TN operations.
It was great fun to work with Mr.Raghunaath , working on project plans, site planning from the scratch including Microwave planning and Capacity Planning. The engineers were all excited about the amazing rollout to follow eventhough they had to put in lot of weekends and extra hours to bring up the sites. There were instances in which to launch a town like Palani where we had only 1 E1 capacity and the drop will give only a very few timeslots, we had to try innovative methods with the help and support of the switch engineers along with Mr.Ravikumar.The peak achievement was turning up 43 sites in 30 days and an article got published in our hub newsletter. There were lot of awards to follow.
I want to state that if it was not for the wonderful Team work and the excellent team of engineers of TamilNadu this project would never have been successful. Thanks to my entire team of Engineering TN.
