This week marks my 4th week on the job. I started around 1 month ago, and it has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride in my new place. To say that my job is easier than before is not entirely true, but to say it’s much harder than before is also a claim I cannot stand by.
It’s just different
Different in the sense that this is, in its true sense, a product based company. The division that I am in just slaps on the consulting services to support it. If the product is the base, than the consulting services are just the sweet layers and frost that makes the cake more palatable and my service, my little service would just be the toppings.
Yes, toppings sounds about right. It’s how I would define my scope of work, which is why it’s different. For over a decade, I have been so used to delivering the whole lock, stock and barrel when it comes to delivering a full change suite programme. I am so used to choosing the ingredients, baking the mix, showing my samples to the client, adding the frost, doing the toppings and the icing and adding the cherry to deliver a beautiful and totally satisfying cake to my client that even if they want to complain something about the cake, they can’t – because they don’t have the resources, and more importantly the recipe and the expertise to bake the cake. So it’s all on me and my talented bunch of consultants to deliver the promised product at the end of the day.
Contrast that to my new job, where I don’t have to be concerned about the quality of the cake. You could think that all I am required to do is supply the receipe, provide the cake molds, give them the instructions, and they go and figure it out. All I am needed to do is check in on them to see how the cake is coming along and provide advise on the progress of their cake.
That’s it. No end-to-end delivery of the programme, no need of resources and manpower to make the cake. Just the recipe, at most maybe the base, and a list of things for us to handover to the client to take on.
Sounds like a dream job as it’s really easy. And it’s true, it is definitely not as taxing as before, because we are not a services corporation. We are a product based technology company. So we just need to breathe, preach and convince people why their hard earned budgets should go to our product. And since we are not primarily a consulting based company, we don’t necessarily have to wage in a price war with the competition.
Sounds good right? I mean it really does! But, and there’s a but for sure, its different. Expectations need to be managed. More adequate coaching is needed, which I never had to worry about as much in the past. And the catch of it all – their success, the success of the cake that we are asking them to bake, is entirely dependent on them…and in turn we get impacted in some way too if things go south. So the risk is real, might be low, but definitely it’s there.
So I guess that’s why I am still on the fence with my new job. At the end of the day, as wifey reminds me, it’s just a job. It’s just an income to provision the family and for us to consider our savings.
