As you probably know we’re not big on titles here, but my title is technically COO. So we’re not a company with multiple layers of management so the first thing you need to know is I get my hands dirty, still knee deep in day-to-day operations. The average day involves a lot of project management and coordination. By 9:15 I’ve had 3 stand up meetings, one with our customer success team (you’ve all met Curtis haven’t you?[link to Curtis post]), one with our offshore team and one with our in-house development team. From there is usually about digging out from a few hundred emails and seeing what calls have been scheduled. We generally don’t have fires to put out, but if there are they’re the first to get prioritized if they came into our ticketing system overnight.
We have clients all over the world, spanning almost every time zone so just because it’s a little after 9AM in the tiny state of Delaware doesn’t mean the world stops. After getting organized and catching up on emails there may be some technical integration calls with one of the e-Procurement systems we work with or a tricky Ariba integration that our development team is having issues so we need to escalate. My job isn’t always knowing the answer, but knowing who can get us the answer. Many of the things we do we can draw on the over 10 years of experience, but more importantly we have relationships with people that can get an answer.
By noon I’ve talked with our development team and worked a bit with our sales team to find out if “a project is even possible to do”.
After lunch it’s usually when our project calls are scheduled and overflow work comes into play. I average 4-5 integration/status calls per day depending on our workload and the time of year. They range from a kickoff call to talk about the project scope to determine punchout/electronic PO/electronic invoicing to a strategy call to determine the product data feed from a customers’ ERP system.
As I wrap up the day, it’s time to review what was accomplished and what still needs to be done tomorrow. I set some priorities and ensure all incoming work was entered into our ticketing system or project management system so when we come in tomorrow we can get right to work.
The most notable thing about an average day is that there is no average day, each one is quite varied and no two are alike.