My greatest rewards were different

My story stems from my profile I penned down for ‘Our People’ and I’d like to quote a part of it here “I don’t try to do better than anyone else. I only try to do better than myself”.

Allow me to elaborate further.

‘Treat Offloading’ was a project that truly challenged my abilities. In January 2010 the Manager OFNP informed the team that one of our major hub sites in Faisalabad had to be vacated since the Punjab government had issued orders to demolish the building. We had only two months to make alternate arrangements for the traffic. It was a daunting task as the LDI Hub installed there was handling traffic for the entire southern and south western parts of Punjab. Any disruption of service could result in revenue loss of millions of rupees per month potentially affecting 6 million subscribers. The contingency plan was to divert major chunk of traffic to Alcatel MSCs of Lahore.

My line manager reposed his faith in my ability to pull this one off when assigning the project to me. I knew I had to give it my best and took it as a personal challenge.

In hindsight, we had dealt with a pre-planned project of such magnitude back in June 2009 and it took approximately 6 months and USD 400,000 to complete. However on this occasion manpower and financial resources were limited and timelines were tough meaning the odds had really stacked up.

Post planning I jumped right into the project by executing optimization activities in night shifts, visiting Faisalabad over weekends to create bandwidth and configuring hardware to create buffers well before commencement of the project.  Each day 300 E1s had to be added however as per standard operating procedure the time line for adding 300 E1s was 3 days. However we added and debugged these E1s in one day. A total of 3000 E1s were added from Lahore to all other hubs of Pakistan (More than 13 cities) in record time.

Each day was a milestone that we achieved as a team. Treat bakers was successfully offloaded on the 3rd of March and all traffic through Lahore became operational on 27th of February.

I earned 3 recognition awards during this project. However the greatest reward came with the sense of achievement and the immense learning experience.

Curious about more success stories? Learn about the achievements of Mian Muti ur Rehman and Kashif Saleem as well!