How agile is your OctopOSS?
“Agility means that you are faster than your competition. Agile time frames are measured in weeks and months, not years.” Michael Hugos Our Requirements Capture Page has just been updated to include a template showing how we capture requirements using the Agile User Stories method.
OctopOSS Exit Strategies
“It is very difficult to get a project approved at Lend Lease, because: – An enormous amount of due dilligence is required to be undertaken in order to understand all the risks – It must be clear that the project has drawn on existing expertise and experience within Lend Lease – The project faces high financial […]
Headlights on your OctopOSS
“There’s no other breakthrough in management that I know of that has as much bang for the buck as information technology.” Bask Iyer, CIO of Juniper on CIO.com The link above is an interesting article describing how IT is seen to be a mechanism for driving efficiency, but not often as a means of driving […]
Where is Michaelangelo?
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” Michelangelo It strikes me that the worker of today focuses on an ever-narrower field of specialisation. Cross-functional teams offer a means of cross-pollenisation of ideas between specialists in their fields but does each individual in the team […]
Product vs Operation
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Bill Gates Variation is the enemy of continual improvement, so once your OSS is operational you are seeking conformity, […]
How much will your OSS/BSS cost?
“If I was slashed and cut into pieces, over and over again, and put into the mill and ground into flour, burnt by fire and mixed with ashes – even then, I could not estimate Your Value.” Sri Guru Granth Sahib You ask all the difficult questions don’t you? Actually, “how much will this cost” […]
The Aircraft Carrier Analogy
“The Navy has both a tradition and a future–and we look with pride and confidence in both directions.” Admiral George Anderson In days gone by, CSPs enjoyed command of the sea. Their boats were big, powerful and mobile enough to move around world. However, due to their size it requires significant planning and effort for a […]
Last year’s words
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” T.S. Eliot Happy new year! 2013 is the year that PassionateAboutOSS.com is officially launched. This blog-roll will continue to pose another voice, making a beginning towards a better OctopOSS
OctopOSS APIs
“Operators are currently at a beginner’s level of capability exposure for developers. They need to step up their game, look at how enterprises have solved this problem. Deliver a rich, secure, reliable, well managed API framework that makes applications both cool and reliable over their networks, else developers will simply choose OTT providers” Sean O’Sullivan […]
Is The OctopOSS on TV?
“Over 60 years ago, broadcast television introduced channels 1-10 in the U.S., and, furthering this momentum, channelization provided channels 11-1,000 via cable and satellite in the 1980s. As this decade is earmarked by seismic technology and media changes, the next few years will be laser-focused on creating the next 100,000 channels – delivered across a […]
OctopOSS Mentoring
“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” Robert Frost In recent years there has been a proliferation of professional mentoring in many fields of business. I just did a Google search and didn’t find a single OSS mentor. A keyword search showed that nobody was looking for one either. It seems there is no […]
Your Theatrical OctopOSS
“For Porter, the ultimate profit potential of an industry is a finite fixed amount: the only question is who is going to get which share of it.Sound business is however unlike warfare or sports in that one company’s success does not require its rivals to fail. Unlike competition in sports, every company can choose to […]
Not all relationships are equal
“Even if you’re Apple, it’s not about you” Sonia Simone In a healthy personal relationship, each partner is approximately equal. In a healthy business relationship, there is a vast difference in balance. As a business, if you: Listen to the customer far more than you talk Give more time and attention to your customer base […]
What’s my number?
“When you think you can’t, revisit a previous triumph.”. Jack Canfield Just as naming conventions are important within the OctopOSS at an application level, so are numbering plans at a network level. The OctopOSS often introduces as significant increase in IP addresses allocated to network management (eg on the management VLAN). For the purpose of […]
Building a guiding coalition
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead Christmas Day would seem like an appropriate day to discuss a guiding coalition. A new OctopOSS project will need a large stakeholder body to be highly organised and excited about the […]
Surround yourself with visionaries
“Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.” John Wooden Change, innovation and product improvement comes from the collision of ideas from a diversity of thoughts. Art, industrial design, logistics, mathematics, computing, storage, automation – all these industries have improvements to offer to OSS. Surrounding yourself with visionaries and […]
Cross-domain research
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” Henry Ford Henry Ford is widely acknowledged for creating the production line that revolutionised the automobile industry, bringing cars within financial reach of the common man. However, Ford’s autobiography states that he borrowed the idea from the “disassembly” lines used by Armour for processing […]
An alternative profit
“Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart.” Dilbert In times when it is difficult to find money for new OctopOSS projects, revenue protection / fraud detection / leakage analysis could potentially bring quick payback. I was once indirectly involved in an OSS project worth several million […]
Merging BSS with OSS?
“Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center.” Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Are we already starting to see the merging of BSS (customer facing systems) and OSS (network facing systems)? Since carriers are going to be asked by customers to be increasingly transparent, they will need to deliver combined information across the B/OSS. […]
OctopOSS Training
“The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.” Plato Training is only useful if it is context-sensitive and interactive. If you want the best results from training, you have to build customised training for the specific customer environment (ie equipment types, service types, naming conventions, etc). If a load from production […]