“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.”
John Ruskin.
The telco industry is well known for having a five nines (ie 99.999%) up-time engineering standard. That’s about 5 minutes of down-time per year. That’s pretty impressive, although granted it still leaves room for improvement.
OSS are used to measure figures like up-time (and many more of course). This gives CSPs the data to track and manage towards zero defects, or no down-time per year. Admirable ambitions for any organisation indeed.
There’s only one slight problem with this perspective. A telco might think that zero defects equals high quality. Unfortunately what the telco thinks is completely irrelevant. It’s what their customers think the definition of quality is that is important.
Given that CSPs have far lower NPS (Net Promoter Scores) than other industries, it appears that CSPs need to get more in touch with what criteria their customers really use to determine quality.
Since we as OSS experts are responsible for collecting quality data, perhaps we should also be looking beyond network up-time statistics (and other similar metrics) and try to:
It’s quite possible that the customer quality metrics can only be measured through surveys and/or dialogue, which isn’t necessarily reachable from your OSS, but then the key is to identify the leading indicators that an OSS/BSS can collect (eg billing variability) that result in these customer-based metrics.
Aside. If you’re wondering how to track back from customer metrics to their leading indicators in OSS, leave me a message and I can introduce you to a company that has tools that can simplify this process.
Over the years, I’ve often referred to The Corkscrew Analogy or Momentum Spiral to describe a mindset of incremental improvement that’s needed to keep an
We’ve embarked on a journey of trying to plan for the future of OSS/BSS, not by predicting the future, but by seeking ways to be
As discussed in the previous article, “Future Scenario Planning: Have you given up on doing an OSS transformation? (part 1)” part of the fun of
Earlier in the week, a friend mentioned he was reading “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland. It’s not an OSS book per se, but does provide some
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
