My job

I am asking a lot of old friends to sign up to this blog thing so I thought I would let everyone know what I am doing at the moment.

I've been working in Brussels for Proximus, the market leader mobile phone company for 15 months now as their Data Architect. I am responsible for the Proximus Concept Model (PxCM) an enterprise data model. To most folk this would probably be the most boring job in the world, but it keeps me entertained. The pay isn’t great but as I am learning new stuff almost every day I don’t mind too much.

As part of the job I have written a two-day training course in the fundamentals of the enterprise data model called the “PxCM Vocabulary”. I thought it was going to be given to the other members of my team, some 20 people or so. To my surprise my boss decided that 350 people needed to attend the course! I’ve been training 2 days a week for the last couple of months.

My contract with Proximus was due to expire at the end of this month (May) at my instigation. I was finally getting bored of the concept modelling and I certainly was very bored with the training, despite getting rave reviews from almost everyone who attended the course. I had planned to go back to England and do nothing for a couple of months and then see what came up.

About a month ago boss came along and explained that they were finding it almost impossible to find someone internally or externally to replace me and was I interested in tendering for the continued training. I told him I wasn’t interested and he said something along the lines of “Every man has his price”.

So I submitted a tender for the training at a fairly high price. If they accepted it the rate was high enough to compensate for the boredom and physical strain of training, if they rejected it, fine too, because I didn’t really want to do it anyway.

I was told my price for the training was “ridiculous” and they went out to tender for it. When the tenders came back in Proximus started talking to me and tried to beat me down.

At almost the same moment I had a sudden change of heart – perhaps the subject of another blog, and I decided I wanted to stay on in Brussels. I resubmitted my tender, this time with a 20% discount and a proposal for consultancy at Proximus for the additional 3 days that I wouldn’t be training. In fact this put up my overall price but they didn’t notice that – I guess because the consultancy would come out of a different budget.

I was dragged into my boss’s office at the end of last week and accused of blackmailing them! I told him I thought my price as a reasonable one and reflected the true commercial price for this kind of training “That’s where you are wrong, because HTTelekom Ltd (a well known company in the field) is offering a price per student that works out cheaper than you.” I was stunned. It turned out that they had been much more expensive than even my original proposal but had also been asked to re-tender and had come in cheaper than me. My boss said he wanted me to give the training, so I said “What would you suggest is a suitable amount for me to charge for the training then”. To my surprise he named a figure, a figure about two and half times higher than my current rate but still a bit lower than my tendered price.

I said I would go away and think about it. Back at my desk I wrestled with Excel and the information I had just been given and applied the rates I had been given to a “per student” price and a very round number dropped out of the formula. I had discovered my competitor’s price, and all my boss wanted me to do was match it. I then recalculated the total value of the contract with a per student price and the consultancy added in, and depending on the rate they want me to train the resulting value of the whole thing is within 5% (plus or minus) of my original price!

The problem they had was they couldn’t calculate the difference between my per course price and my competitor’s per student price. On top of that they were morally offended at the prospect of having to pay me, a lowly contractor all that money!

Anyway I resubmitted my proposal with the new pricing on Monday and they have immediately followed up with some clarification questions, so I’m feeling quietly confident that I’ll be in Brussels for the next 6 months and well paid to boot.

Fingers crossed, I’ll be training 2 days a week, and when not training I’ll be working on their Teradata data warehouse project – something I’ve been wanting to do for over 6 months and I get to stay in Brussels, a very civilized city.

Enough writing. Today is a public holiday, and so now I'm off to "A La Morte Subite" for a very large Geuze beer and something to eat for lunch.