Well, it's been a fairly hectic, yet eye opening first week. Quite often the perception for many, be it our customers or even some of our internal staff, is that they are unsure as to what the actual role of the Technical Shift Manager is, or that they just sit around all day and don't actually do very much 
Here's a brief insight into what I've been doing and why I've really been struggling to find some time to pop into my favourite forums.
One of my monthly tasks is to ensure that I do all of my monthly performance reviews by the 20th of each month. This is itself is quite a mission, given that I manage 13 members of staff, which will become 14 as of next week and potentially more within the coming weeks as we expand our headcount. Each performance review takes 30-45 minutes and I've been trying to do one or two on a daily basis to ensure that I hit my deadline, or else the nice people from HR might come and have a quiet word in my ear ;)
As well as that, I'm also expected to be doing side by side call and ticket coaching, performing QOS (marking my staff on how well they are dealing with calls and tickets), performing action plans and in the occasional instance of a complaint, performing an investigation (which fortunately I haven't had to do yet). Aswell as this, I have two team meetings to perform on a monthly basis, aswell as doing a team wide performance review to my boss at the start of each week.
Additionally, I've been looking into the ways that by Broadband Provisioning Ops Team can improve their turnaround of ticket responses. We've made some massive improvements this week and as a result of this I hope that our customers will have an improved level of expectation and realise that we are doing the best we can to ensure that they are receiving timely updates. Unfortunately with Broadband Provisioning, there are instances where lengthy delays can be experienced when BT have to remove line sharing devices or there is a lack of capacity in the exchange.
Although there are benefits. I now have the longest job title in the company With that, I shall sign off in the hope that I have provided some insight into what us TSM's actually get up to.
All the best,
Your friendly neighbourhood Seconded Technical Shift Manager for the Broadband Provisioning Operations and Customer Services Teams.
James
Week in the life of a Technical Shift Manager