OSS operationalisation at scale

We had a highly flexible network design team at a previous company. Not because we wanted to necessarily, but because we were forced to by the client’s allocation of work.

Our team was largely based on casual workers because there was little to predict whether we needed 2 designers or 50 in any given week. The workload being assigned by the client was incredibly lumpy.

But we were lucky. We only had design work. The lumpiness in design effort flowed down through the work stack into construction, test and deployment teams. The constructors had millions of dollars of equipment that they needed to mobilise and demobilise as the work ebbed and flowed. Unfortunately for the constructors, they’d prepared their rate cards on the assumption of a fairly consistent level of work coming through (it was a very big project).

This lumpiness didn’t work out for anyone in the delivery pipeline, the client included. It was actually quite instrumental in a few of the constructors going into liquidation. The client struggled to meet roll-out targets.

The allocation of work was being made via the client’s B/OSS stack. The B/OSS teams were blissfully unaware of the downstream impact of their sporadic allocation of designs. Towards the end of the project, they were starting to get more consistent and delivery teams started to get into more of a rhythm… just as the network was coming to the end of build.

As OSS builders, we sometimes get so wrapped up in delivering functionality that we can forget that one of the key requirements of an OSS is to operationalise at scale. In addition to UI / CX design, this might be something as simple as smoothing the effort allocation for work under our OSS’s management.

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