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The way I got my first big promotion was by identifying gaps in the company's processes. In my case, I was working on the help desk, and was sort of a hobbyist programmer. Answering help desk calls on the night shift was boring work, and because I was the only one working at night, I didn't have the luxury of getting to ask others what the answer was. I either knew the answer, or knew how to find it. Knowing how to find it was tricky. The Windows group (that supported Windows servers) kept all their information in Sharepoint. The Lotus Notes group kept all their data in Lotus Notes databases. Unix group kept all their documents on NFS shares. Each group knew how to find their data, so it was great for them. But the problem is that if the Tier 1 support can't find it, they have to escalate to Tier 2. This costs more in terms of hourly wages, delays customer satisfaction, and takes longer to solve problems. My solution was to write a central, web-based knowledge base, and I wrote convertors to go to each of the knowledge stores and import it into the knowledge base. Now, as a Tier 1 help desk, I only had one spot to go to for finding knowledge. Customers got support faster, less calls had to be escalated to Tier 2, and all was right in the world. Later I refined the crap out of it and made it really pretty good, but that initial implementation saved the company a lot of money. By not having to engage Tier 2 support as much, that meant they could be working on their regular jobs, like managing servers of streamlining application processes or whatever it was they were meant to do. By offloading the work to the cheaper Tier 1 help desk, that was cost effective. By reducing the time it took to satisfy a given customer request, that meant less workers could handle more calls. That's cost effective. That was a problem that they would have been willing to pay $xxx,000 to solve, because it saved them well more than that, but I just wrote it for them and let them know how much it was saving them. I didn't initially make more money, but I did get moved into a position where I could do more of that, which I did. At some point, I was awarded for having saved the company an average of 3 million per year. At the time, my salary was something like $50k a year. I never struck gold working at that company, but "developed applications to reduce company costs by $3 million per year" looks pretty good on a resume. It sets you apart from the vast majority of developers who are just going to build what they're told to build. It shows that you take initiative, and that you care about more than just what's in the scope of your job -- you care about the company, and the company's bottom line, and can actively impact that bottom line. |