Martina O'Brien
Principal Support Engineer

I work in Global Customer Support, supporting Oracle Application Server Portal. I'm based in Reading in the UK I am part of a European-wide (and ultimately world-wide) technical support team handling questions and problems raised by Oracle customers.

I live in Oxfordshire with my husband and two children - a son 12 and daughter 10. Here's my typical week.

Monday:

I do my daily morning check for any updates from customers on the issues I'm currently working on so that I can respond and also prioritise my work.

Some of the issues I deal with are from customers in the Middle East, many of whom will have been working during our weekend.

I'm also working as coordinator today, which means I keep on eye on issues owned by support engineers in our other centres while they're off shift. I respond to updates from their customers to let them know when their support engineers will be next available and I help where I can.

One of my colleagues is away this week so I reassign her active issues to other members of our team who can progress these while she's away.

Tuesday:

I start the day by preparing for a coaching session later today. I am an ICS (Institute of Customer Service) coach and currently coaching an Oracle Consulting colleague towards her ICS award.

I work on my queue of open issues, do some testing on our own internal machines and I log a new defect for one these issues. It gets screened by a Bug Diagnostics engineer and we then work together to create a good test environment for the developers to work it further.

I meet my ICS practitioner for our coaching session - we agree a target date for her to complete her award and the steps that need to be completed to get there.

I run a Web Conference with a consultant in the Netherlands to directly see a problem on his customer's environment. It's an unusual problem but after we've tried a few steps together, this really helps to clarify the underlying issue.

Wednesday:

I call a couple of customers who I haven't had feedback from for a while.

One is happy that his issue has been resolved, the other requests more time to look into it so we agree to get in touch again next week.

Later that afternoon, I take part in a Round Table meeting - this involves support engineers, support managers, developers, product managers and bug diagnostics engineers from Europe, Asia and the USA. We have wide-ranging discussions about current product issues and most of us manage to come away with an action.

Thursday:

I prepare a short presentation for the rest of my team covering any significant issues from the Round Table meeting yesterday.

I also handle transfer requests from other support teams into the Oracle Portal support team. I review these issues and agree for some to be transferred directly and in other cases I provide advice. I also contact some of these customers directly to get more information before deciding which team can help.

Friday:

We have a team meeting led by our manager.

At our team meeting, I have a short slot where I provide information from our Round Table meeting earlier this week. I do this regularly at most of our team meetings as most of the team do not attend the Round Table meetings.

I also do some knowledge management work - I check a number of our published notes to ensure the information is still current. Things move on quickly with this technology, so it's important to make sure the information we publish is up to date.

Before I finish, I then have a final check through my issues to make sure they are all up to date and ready to continue with next week.

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