Planning your OctopOSS
Looking for some ideas on how to start planning your new OctopOSS project? I’ve just uploaded some sample WBS diagrams, showing how I use them as a planning tool. Refer to the following link.
Author: Ryan
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Building Sandcastles
“Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.” Mark Cuban I’m a great advocate of building a sand-pit environment for the customer to use as early as possible in a project’s life-cycle, even during pre-sales if possible. Using the sand-pit will develop customer […]
The learned customer
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” Booker T. Washington From my experience in OSS vendor evaluation, most vendors’s marketing collateral makes you read between the lines of fluffy-marketing-speak to identify the real functionalities and benefits of their products. In the connected world, a company is going to do a great […]
Positive Psychology
“The worst times can be the best if you think with positive energy” Domenico Dolce OctopOSS projects can be highly stressful workplaces, especially as “dreadlines” approach. To exacerbate this further, it is common for the OSS project team (particularly the vendor’s implementation team) to comprise of many members who are working away from home and […]
Are your interfaces truly enabled?
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Zora Neale Hurston I once worked on an OctopOSS project where a previous consultant had performed an audit on the wide variety of network equipment in a carrier’s network. He had identified the interfaces that were available on these devices and had prepared a list […]
Planting Seeds
Developing a customer’s trust in a product to the point that they’re willing to make a purchase is difficult with OSS tools. The trick is to build advocates in the industry or become the big brand. Common approach is to pick the fruit that’s already grown (ie the RFP) rather than planting seeds. The last-minute […]
OSS Interface Roadmap Tool
The OSS Interface Roadmap tool has now been uploaded under the Tools menu item of the PassionateAboutOSS website.
Development Dilemma
“Innovation comes from the producer – not from the customer.” W. Edwards Deming As the head of OSS product development, what do you do when facing the following dilemma? Spend 100 man-days developing a highly customised functionality that will only suit a single existing customer or 100 man-days developing road-mapped functionality that caters for new initiatives […]
Contact Centres = Cost Centres?
“Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about operations and customer relationships.” Michael Dell Technical contact centres could be seen as a cost centre, the source of expense to the OSS vendor. As such, they are usually resourced to match (ie lower-end resources, under-resourced, etc). But what if the mind-set of the vendor […]
Gartner Magic Quantrant Oct ’12
Gartner Group has just published their Magic Quadrant review of the top OSS solution providers in the market, as per this link.
Understanding the customer’s audience
“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.” Roy H. Williams The technical (left brain) versus the visual (right brain) both need to be catered for in the sales and marketing of your OSS. The customer’s executive tend to want to easily see big-picture benefits, whereas the technical team wants to […]
Designing your business processes like Jack Welch
“We don’t need the questioners and checkers, the nitpickers who bog down the process…. Today, each staff person has to ask, “How do I add value? How do I make people on the line more effective and competitive?” – Jack Welch I like to consider a company’s business processes like a flowing river. The aim […]
Making an OSS sale
Sales is all about getting the customer to know you, like you, trust you. Many vendors do this well. However, does it also make sense to extend this concept to trusting the product, not just the people? An OctopOSS represents a large investment of time and resources for an organisation. Product evaluation is often a […]
Collaborative Teams
As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point in the wrong direction! Irish Blessing When implementing an OctopOSS, consider building a single, transparent team where the customer’s resources blend with the vendor’s. The vendor knows the minutae of their product (they should!), whilst the customer knows the intimate details of their […]
Traffic Engineering
Don’t have a Traffic Engineering module in your OSS, but have performance analysis and flow-through provisioning tools? If you can carefully configure threshold events in your performance tool to trigger your provisioning tool to fire commands back into the network, then you can create your own traffic engineering.
Meeting Deadlines
“I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.” – Scott Adams, Dilbert OSS projects can be brutal on work-plans, budgets, scope and deadlines (not to mention the sanity of the broader project teams and project sponsors). But that is forgotten* in time if the project can deliver […]
Implementing an OSS through a customer’s eyes
“When I was with John, I thought he was the greatest person in the whole world.” Then why did you marry Bill, the friend asked. “Because when I’m with Bill, he makes me feel that I’m the greatest person in the world.” Technology is not the panacea for business problems. A vendor’s product, a vendor’s process […]
Doing things differently
“The man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.” James Crook A large proportion of OctopOSS projects fail to achieve their original objectives. This suggests that alternate approaches are required within the industry. I once worked on a project that had been guided by five project managers (PM) in two […]
Inspiring the customer
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” William Arthur Ward When an organisation identifies that a new OctopOSS project is required, it is common for some or all of the project’s influencers and evaluators to have limited knowledge about a potential vendor’s products. In some cases, […]
Adapting to each customer
“I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” Winston Churchill OSS projects are usually delivered to organisations that have many working parts (people, processes, bureaucracies, politics, business units, etc). Rather than closely understanding and adapting to the company, a vendor has a tendency of bringing “best practice” to projects […]