Since moving to New Zealand in early 2014 from her native India, Ujwala Joshi has been revelling in the freedom and the choices offered by her new home and her new job at Stellar Consulting.
“I’m trying to do all the things that were hard to do in India,” she says, “especially adventure and sports like ice skating and swimming – probably things that New Zealand kids have been doing for years!”
Ujwala, 26, finds she now has a lot more time for her many interests, from dancing to music and cycling, thanks to a huge reduction in her daily commute. Instead of a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride twice a day in Bangalore, she now enjoys a relatively effortless 25-minute trip across Auckland’s Harbour Bridge to Stellar’s offices in Queen Street.
(Traffic problems in Auckland are nothing compared to rush hour in Bangalore, she will assure you, and she’s noticed that Kiwis seem to be much better at obeying the traffic rules.)
Ujwala joined Stellar in June 2014 as our first BI Support Consultant. She came well-prepared, having earned an Honours BTech in Bioinformatics from SASTRA University in her home state of Tamil Nadu. She also brought five years of experience in customer support at Tata Consultancy Services using the ITIL system of best practices for IT service.
“I think the contribution that I can make at Stellar is that I’ve worked in support using ITIL, so I can say ‘OK, we’re a small organisation but we can still provide the level of support our customers expect from a larger organisation.’”
While some Stellar clients are supported on site, many will now be turning to the new Support Consultant when they need assistance. So how will this change the service they receive?
“I think it will be more streamlined,” says Ujwala. “They have a person they can go to right now, but maybe over time it will be a support team they can go to.”
She has also taken responsibility for maintaining the Knowledge Base that helps Stellar’s staff and customers quickly find answers to common questions.
In her first few months on the job, Ujwala was able to assist one of Stellar’s largest clients as they implemented a new BI system.
“There were a lot of changes going on,” she recalls, “so there was a lot of people testing, and coming back saying ‘this is working’ or ‘this is not working’.
“Some users were not getting the data they were looking for. In some cases, it was because they weren’t looking in the right place, or they didn’t know that this is how the requirement was initially written.
“So I would look to see whether the system was working as it should. If ‘yes,’ then I would find out if the customer needed it to be changed.”
Sometimes Ujwala has helped a customer resolve access issues, or to troubleshoot when a reporting dashboard no longer worked – perhaps because the customer had made changes to another system that supplied the data.
But Ujwala isn’t one to sit about waiting for a customer to call with a problem.
“You have to be proactive,” she says. “You have monitoring tools and you are constantly looking for ways to ensure that you know what’s going on – or that you can predict that something is going to go wrong.
“So customers shouldn’t be surprised to get a call from me after hours to say: “I’ve found a problem and I’m going to be working on it.’”
Ujwala is also enjoying the way people work at Stellar.
“Coming from an extremely different background, the first thing that struck me was that there is freedom to do what you want, to use different approaches, to be creative,” she says. “When you have so many options, and can choose the best one, it’s liberating.
“A good thing about Stellar, I think, is that it’s not just working with one technology. We partner with almost all the BI solutions out there.
“Plus, there’s no hierarchy. It’s not like there’s a manager and you report to her constantly. So that’s scary in one way, but it’s empowering because you understand that they trust you. You can focus on delivering, and you want to deliver because they trust you. So that’s very different for me – and I really love it.”
And when she’s not looking for ways to better support Stellar customers, you may find Ujwala and her husband on the skating rink at Aotea Square or learning how to sail or paddle a kayak on the Hauraki Gulf. There are so many options just waiting to be explored.
