The hardest job I ever held at Landmark was being the Customer Support Manager for North America.
It was hard for a number of reasons. One was the number of people that I had reporting to me, another was that we were reorganizing the way we provided support (and training, and pre-sales support to the sales force) yet a third was the general oil and gas environment at the time (not good).
We made some basic structural changes in the group while I was there. We decided to start specializing our support folks. Prior to this point, one person would be expected to take support calls one day, do a demo for a sales person the next, and then teach a training course of the software a week later. Sometime we would charge clients for these services, and sometimes we would not.
Now, folks generally don’t like change, but most of these changes were welcome in the group. We set up a “phone room” where all the support calls were routed and answered. We set up a dedicated training group and assigned Bill O’Brian (one of the nicest people I have ever worked with) to create a business. He hired, trained, sold, and created a cash flow stream where none existed before.
We had to hire so many trainers that we had whole recruiting campaigns were we would interview tens of people a day. We also “certified” out of work geoscientists whom we could then use in peak demand situations and pay people when we needed them.
We had some great trainers, and some interesting training stories from this group. One year Amoco had made an investment in an Albanian oil field. As part of their investment they bought a couple of workstations for the Albanian Geophysicists. We had to train them.
This was the first time there two fellows had been out of their country. They had no concept of an individual computer (imagine when you tell someone “Grab your mouse and click on “open” and you are greeted with blank stares. You go back to basics) nor much idea about how the US consumer culture worked.
Originally there were housed in a Hotel, but Amoco suggested that we put them up in an apartment, as it would be cheaper. When we took them to the apartment their eyes got big and they were very impressed. Then they were shocked when they realized that it was a two bedroom apartment, and they would not be sharing a bed!
When we took them to the grocery store it was like “Moscow on the Hudson” and they were amazed. But all they bought were potatoes. Lots of potatoes.
The idea of “on-site support” was also started during this time. Clients would pay to have one of our people go to their office every day, and they would pay us to make that happen. It was great for both sides, and really increased the utilization of the software.
But probably the worst part of the job was that Landmark released a version of its software named SeisWorks. Version one-point-oh came out on my watch. It was the worst software I have ever tried to use that was deemed “commercial”
We were under a lot of pressure to get this software delivered to meet some competitive threats. It was years in the making and would ultimate deliver some huge advantages for the clients.
But this was an example of software delivered way too soon.
And we in North American were the only group fool enough (or desperate enough) to deploy it.
From the minute it was installed it was a disaster. Nobody could keep it running for more that about 20 minutes without crashing.
MY favorite bug was one introduced because of a change in the underlying software language we used. In the old version, timing was measured in milliseconds. In the new, in seconds. But you can imagine the problems introduced if you didn’t know that. Suddenly the software was apparently hanging when it was really just waiting for time to pass. There was a clever solution we found, however. If you moved the mouse continuously, the timing loop would be skipped. We called it “Mouse Pumping” (and is surprising useful in much software today! Try it sometime when it looks like your software is slow or frozen)
During that time I never got one phone call from a client telling me what a great job the Company was doing. I spent a real lot of my time on sales calls trying to explain what we were going to do better, and how soon we were going to do it better. It was a tough time.
Ultimately, though, the Company did step up. We created a hit team and prioritized the bugs, fixed them, and delivered the product we should have delivered in the first place. There is a huge lesson I still carry with me to this day about this. Do the job right. It is cheaper and faster than doing it again.
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