Why you’ll rarely be bored working as a network engineer
BT’s Gráinne Hanley describes her function in producing sure networks are managing smoothly and how she bargains with the sudden require to swap to incident administration mode.
Gráinne Hanley is community operations centre supervisor at BT Ireland. She potential customers a staff dependable for taking care of and governing the core networks and infrastructure of BT Ireland, with a consistent emphasis on purchaser working experience.
Her group provides fault troubleshooting assistance for Irish shoppers throughout a broad variety of domestic and worldwide network solutions.
Hanley joined BT Ireland in 2009 as an access efficiency engineer. In 2018, she took a 1-year secondment as a change manager before getting up her recent position in 2020.
Prior to joining the firm, Hanley invested a few and a 50 percent many years with O2 Eire as a community purposes engineer and then as an obtain efficiency engineer. She has a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering from Dublin City University and a master’s diploma in computer system science from College College or university Dublin.
‘If a community incident happens then I need to straight away switch to incident administration mode’
– GRÁINNE HANLEY
If there is these types of a factor, can you describe a normal working day in the career?
Presented the mother nature of the career in functions, there is hardly ever a normal working day. My crew are 24/7, 365 days of the 12 months, so my working day is dependent on how the community is jogging operationally.
Given that I operate a typical working 7 days of Monday to Friday, I start each and every working day by having a handover from my team about the night time ahead of and receiving any important updates on faults or troubles that I need to be informed of.
Over the class of the working day, I function on escalations to get customer troubles resolved, corrective action programs to mitigate from reoccurrence of any the latest difficulties and, if demanded, doc the root lead to of any problems for prospects. My working day usually includes a number of meetings with service supervisors and prospects as nicely as touchpoint meetings with other operational teams.
There are also a handful of governance meetings above the training course of the week these types of as the change advisory board, in which we critique and approve all prepared engineering performs, and transfer to assurance, in which we critique and focus on any approaching new goods to ensure that all expected complex documentation and guidance procedures are in spot to guarantee the very best doable knowledge for our buyers.
A essential aid tool in the community operations centre (NOC) is our wallboard at the entrance of the room, which provides a obvious visible indicator of the community wellbeing in terms of alarms, targeted traffic concentrations and connectivity of our main networks throughout all our platforms and sellers. No two days in the NOC are the very same, but which is what retains it interesting!
What forms of challenge do you operate on?
My crew is concentrated on working day-to-working day operational stability and guaranteeing the effectiveness of our core networks to the optimum conventional.
As a result, the important items of operate that I’m associated in are ongoing enhancement initiatives aimed at streamlining processes and eventually seeking to more boost the shopper encounter.
I uncover it pretty enjoyable to guidance my crew by striving to simplify our strategies of doing work, addressing any bugs/challenges that they face and ensuring that they’re saved perfectly knowledgeable about the constant variations in conditions of new items, new processes, new technologies and new clients that we assistance.
What techniques do you use on a everyday basis?
The principal abilities I attract on these times are statistical assessment, incident management, issue management and group coordination.
I never know if I entirely appreciated the variety of various individuals – these kinds of as discipline engineers, get professionals, support administrators, issue managers, provider desk agents, job professionals, and many others – that I’d be working with on a normal foundation just before having on the purpose.
About time, this has truly helped me to refine and superior tailor my communications to go well with my audience!
What are the hardest sections of engineering?
I find that in operations it’s quite hard to prepare your day, as if a network incident happens then I should straight away swap to incident administration method, jump on the incident bridge and enable coordinate the investigation groups, although preserving company administrators and prospects informed of development.
This usually means that everything else that was planned for the day simply demands to be reprioritised and rescheduled.
Do you have any efficiency recommendations that aid you as a result of the working day?
I locate organisational equipment this kind of as OneNote can be very helpful to preserve keep track of of all the different updates, actions and conference minutes that I want.
I also uncover that acquiring IM chats established up with several key teams can seriously support with much easier, a lot quicker communications and team updates.
And of program, getting a limited wander outdoors to grab a mid-morning takeaway espresso can genuinely help to distinct the head.
What competencies and equipment are you utilizing to converse each day with your colleagues?
The very last pair of yrs beneath Covid-19 has seriously amplified the range of communication solutions that I use in the office.
From WhatsApp for brief test-ins with people today, IM, Teams conferences and shared on line information to e-mail for much more formal comms.
Also, considering that my workforce operates a 24/7 change pattern, I manage an online Groups webpage to maintain my staff knowledgeable of all difficulties, adjustments, focus parts and recognition that they can dip into no matter what time of day or night they want to catch up on goings on.
How has this part changed as the engineering sector has grown and evolved?
The main community is continually transforming, evolving and diversifying as new systems are rolled out and outdated types are retired.
With just about every improve, there comes the want for much more upskilling and progress. Both equally in my present-day and prior roles, I have seen some excellent actions forward in technological know-how and so the problem is to generally test to continue to be inquisitive about what’s coming up coming.
What do you enjoy most about performing as an engineer?
I like when we get to the root of an problem and determine out how to deal with it!
What information would you give to another person who wishes to work in engineering?
You will need to be someone who enjoys change and who is usually inquisitive, but it’s a terrific vocation and you’ll seldom be bored!
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