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World’s Best Practice in OSS*

When it comes to OSS projects, I’ve worked in a dozen countries and been involved in almost every role including: Chief Technical Officer Program / Project Manager Strategic Advisor External Consultant Enterprise Architect (across solutions including inventory, discovery, alarms, performance, provisioning, traffic engineering, line test management, service management, GIS / spatial tools, ticketing, service management, billing, etc) Deployment Manager Network Subject Matter Expert (SME) (across networks…

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17/11/2012 No Comments

Context-sensitive data. An OSS tester’s dilemma

“It’s more important to have the right people involved than it is to follow the process exactly right.“ Rex Black Just as vendors have learnt the importance of context-sensitive help, there is also the need for context-sensitive training and context-sensitive testing (and context-sensitive everything else for that matter). I once worked on a project where a team of about 20 testers flew into the country, stayed…

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16/11/2012 No Comments

You get back what you put in

There is an old parable [from Earl Nightingale] about a man is sitting in front of a cold, empty fireplace and demanding, “Give me heat!” Obviously, you must first put fuel in the hearth and light a fire before you can expect to get any warmth. The same holds true for OctopOSS projects. You only get out what you put in. Customers need to be deeply…

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14/11/2012 No Comments

Building a Business Case

"Selling is not telling, selling is asking" Zig Ziglar Over the years of acting as a strategic advisor to customers on new OctopOSS projects, it only recently dawned on me that there have typically been two gaping omissions: The customer rarely has a compelling business case in mind before diving into the project (they invariably have sound technical drivers though) and I've never seen a vendor pitch…

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13/11/2012 No Comments

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.

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13/11/2012 No Comments

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 trust in the product and excitement for what will be forthcoming.…

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12/11/2012 No Comments

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 deal of research before even speaking with you for the first…

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11/11/2012 No Comments

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 their associated support mechanisms. Team development often focuses on building a…

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10/11/2012 No Comments

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 of each. The OSS vendor was making good progress, having reached…

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08/11/2012 No Comments

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 pitch (picking the fruit) is not the best answer, albeit a…

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07/11/2012 No Comments

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 in the network industry? Do you think in the short term…

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06/11/2012 No Comments

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 were to change? Every contact with the customer is an opportunity…

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05/11/2012 No Comments

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 see the specifications, lists of features, etc. It’s likely that the…

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04/11/2012 No Comments

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 is to get as many actions (customer orders, fault rectifications, etc)…

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27/10/2012 No Comments

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 difficult exercise for the organisation as products have vastly different capabilities…

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26/10/2012 No Comments

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 company far better than an outsider could. Both sides of this…

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25/10/2012 No Comments

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.

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24/10/2012 No Comments

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 fundamental value to the business. The dilemma is that work-plans, budgets,…

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23/10/2012 No Comments

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 and a vendor's team are all vitally important...... to the vendor. To…

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22/10/2012 No Comments