"What do you think the difference is between having 2 reasons to achieve a goal and having 100 reasons? When you have 100 reasons, reaching a goal is pretty much a certainty." Ron Whitaker in this interesting blog that recounts an urban legend study about goal setting. Ron's blog also provides a downloadable worksheet for planning and goal setting. The goals and action plan are designed…
Read More »"I used to say of him (Napoleon) that his presence on the field made the difference of 40,000 men." Duke of Wellington. If you really want to learn about your OSS deeply, you have to get out into the battlefield - at the customer site, with the OSS operators, with the developers, with the innovators in your field, with the CSP's customers who are touched by…
Read More »"Why would any company pay a computer programmer with out-of-date skills a salary of say $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate — who has no skills — for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate." Vivek Wadhwa…
Read More »"Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you've lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that's good." Elizabeth Edwards. Many leading OSS products have been built around concepts that have little relevance today. They have been enhanced and enhanced…
Read More »"I consider each business investment based on concept and revenue." Daymond John. Many CSPs are in an era of reducing revenues as their historic cash-cows such as voice calls (especially STD and IDD calls), text messages and data are becoming increasingly commoditised or replaced by Over The Top (OTT) service offerings. They're also scrambling to identify revenue replacement mechanisms. Smart grids, mobile payments, increasing smart-phone usage…
Read More »"48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop 12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop ONLY 10% of sales people make more than three contacts 2% of sales are made on the first contact 3% of sales are made on the second contact 5% of sales are made on the third…
Read More »"Companies can get too big. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, which occurs when companies get less efficient after reaching a certain size." Chris Mayer In the agrarian age, a vendor typically had a small, local, loyal tribe. In the industrial age, "factories" dominated creating vastly more product more efficiently and was able to reach a much larger tribe. In the information age,…
Read More »"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear" No OSS analogies apply today.
Read More »"Commitment and talent are unconnected unless you connect them" John C. Maxwell. OSS live and die on the quality of the connections you are able to make with them. Commitment and talent are but one of many. There are so many others including: Performance and maintenance; Process and life-cycle; Outages and spares; Resolutions and knowledge sharing; Designs and delivery; Usage patterns and capacity planning; Inventory and customer…
Read More »"Blunt knives work the hardest" OSS, when done well, can be a powerful force of efficiency. But when done poorly, or not at all, can be a burden to an organisation. A past customer has invested heavily in OSS over the years, but the tools have become dated and cumbersome. I was amazed to find that many members of the team were attempting separate rubber band,…
Read More »"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness" Chinese proverb. My first OSS was a massive challenge. Some may have found the project daunting. Actually, many of my colleagues did. But it never felt that way to me for some reason. There were so many things to do that no matter what I worked on, it was getting us incrementally closer to delivery. There…
Read More »"The plan isn't nearly as important as the planning" Keith Rattie in Hit the Ground Running OSS evolve too quickly to have a single authoritative plan. Planning and re-planning are the key, with the resultant plans just way-points along the journey.
Read More »"Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you're going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren't quite on the radar yet and try to solve those." Sean Parker One of my favourite vendor selection and requirements gathering stories relates to a tender that was run by the Air Ministry in Britain during the 1930s. The aim was to develop…
Read More »“We're just going to have more and more traffic, and more and more congestion. Regardless of whether we decide to go forward with these projects or not, one way or the other, we will pay.” Jacob Snow Okay, so your OSS/BSS can't really protect you from getting the flu, but perhaps it can ease congestion (of your network, rather than your nose). Telecommunications congestion tends to…
Read More »"Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!" Gene Buckley. As President of Sikorsky Aircraft, Gene Buckley knows a bit about servicing a specialised field with knowledgeable customers, just like the OSS industry. There are a couple of interesting side notes to his quote…
Read More »"If you’re not serving the customer, your job is to be serving someone who is." Jan Carlzon As much as we may consider CSPs to be the customers of OSS, the real customers are actually the ones using the CSP's services. There is massive change underway for almost all CSPs globally, perhaps with the exception of regulated monopoly carriers. In deregulated markets, voice and data services are…
Read More »"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning." Bill Gates. I'd extend this one step further in the world of OSS and look to learn from your competitors's most unhappy customers. Chances are that they're making the same mistakes as discussed in this Toyota Five-Whys Analysis of OSS. It's better to learn from the mistakes of others than just your own because you simply don't…
Read More »"Customers will want to talk to you if they believe you can solve their problems." Jeffrey Gitomer. This article from Ericsson, indicates that CX (Customer Experience)* is key to a CSP's financial performance according to 81% of C-level executives at tier-one carriers in South-East Asia. The article goes on to say, "Nevertheless, 72 % of executives evaluated their current customer experience as being average or poor. (According to the…
Read More »"Everything feels like its on the precipice of some major transformation, whether we like it or not." Sean Lennon. OSS transformation tends to focus on the activities required to take the OSS from current state to a desired future state (naturally). An OSS Transformation is generally planned around the introduction of new tools, processes and/or functionality. It is the future state where a majority of intellectual…
Read More »“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath's quote elicits a smile. Many an OSS integrator has not "kissed" the network inventory data in their managed network, so they have never had the chance to see how important it is. The raw data coming from the network shows how the network really works, how the customers utilise the network resources…
Read More »"I love when things are transparent, free and clear of all inhibition and judgement." Pharrell Williams. Free fields are often your get out of jail free cards when modelling data in an OSS. They allow you to create the linking keys between domains that would not otherwise exist, where relationships could otherwise not exist. For example, say you have multiple different vendor sub-networks within your network.…
Read More »