OSS Transformation is all about managing change – organisationally, functionally and operationally during in-flight projects. This is the most commonly overlooked factor when planning OSS projects
There’s a particular carrier that I know quite well that appears to despise a particular OSS vendor… but keeps coming back to them… and keeps getting let down by them… but keeps coming back to them. And I’m not just talking about support of their existing OSS, but whole new tools. It never made sense […]
As an implementer of OSS, what’s the single factor that makes it challenging for us to deliver on any of the three constraints of project delivery? Complexity. Or put another way, variants. The more variants, the less chance we have of delivering on time, cost or functionality. So let me ask you, is our next […]
You all know I’m a fan of training operators in OSS sandpits (and as apprenticeships during the build phase) rather than a week or two of classroom training at the end of a project. To reduce the re-work in building a sandpit environment, which will probably be a dev/test environment rather than a production environment, […]
Have you noticed that OSS projects need to go through extensive review to get funding of business cases? That makes sense. They tend to be a big investment after all. Many OSS projects fail, so we want to make sure this one doesn’t and we perform thorough planing / due-diligence. But I do find it […]
We all know that once installed, OSS tend to stay in place for many years. Too much effort to air-lift in. Too much effort to air-lift back out, especially if tightly integrated over time. The monolithic COTS (off-the-shelf) tools of the past would generally be commissioned and customised during the initial implementation project, with occasional […]
“The dartboard, by contrast, is not remotely logical, but is somehow brilliant. The 20 sector sits between the dismal scores of five and one. Most players aim for the triple-20, because that’s what professionals do. However, for all but the best darts players, this is a mistake. If you are not very good at darts, […]
It’s an interesting season as we come up to the EOFY (end of financial year – on 30 June). Budget cycles are coming to an end. At organisations that don’t carry un-spent budgets into the next financial year, the looming EOFY triggers a use-it-or-lose-it mindset. In some cases, organisations are almost forced to allocate funds […]
When we have a big OSS transformation to undertake, we tend to start with the use cases / requirements, work our way through the technical solution and build up an implementation plan before delivering it (yes, I’ve heavily reduced the real number of steps there!). However, we sometimes overlook the organisational change management part. That’s […]
“In the past, business-oriented groups have had ideas about what they want to do and then they come to us… Now, they want to know what technology can bring to the table and then they’ll work on the business plan. So there’s a big gap here. It’s a phenomenon that’s been happening in the last […]
“All over the world – from America’s National Football League (NFL) to the National Basketball Association (NBA), from our own AFL to NRL – athletes and coaches are cultivating club cultures in which tales of personal hardship and woe are welcome, even desirable. All are clamouring to embrace the biggest buzzword in professional sport: vulnerability. […]
“Skills multiply labors by two, five, 10, 50, 100 times. You can chop a tree down with a hammer, but it takes about 30 days. That’s called labor. But if you trade the hammer in for an ax, you can chop the tree down in about 30 minutes. What’s the difference in 30 days and […]
You’re probably familiar with strangler figs, which grow on a host tree, often resulting in the eventual death of the host. You’re probably less familiar with the strangler fig analogy as an OSS transformation or cutover model. The concept is that there is a “host tree” (ie legacy system) that needs to be obsoleted and […]
“The myth is that people play games because they want to avoid challenging work. The reality is, people play games to engage in well-designed, challenging work. The only thing they are avoiding is poorly designed work. In essence, we are replacing poorly designed work with work that provides a more meaningful challenge and offers a […]
“Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.” Rene Descartes. On a recent project, I spent quite a lot of time thinking in terms of problem statements, then mapping them into solutions that could be broken down for assignment to lots of delivery teams – feeding their Agile […]
“You cannot simply have your end users give some specifications then leave while you attempt to build your new system. They need to be involved throughout the process. Ultimately, it is their tool to use.” José Manuel De Arce here. As an OSS consultant and implementer, I couldn’t agree more with José’s quote above. José, […]
We all know the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears where Goldilocks chooses the option that’s not too heavy, not too light, but just right. The same model applies to OSS – finding / building a solution that’s not too heavy, not too light, but just right. To be honest, we probably tend to […]
One of the challenges facing OSS / BSS product designers is which platform/s to tie the roadmap to. Let’s use a couple of examples. In the past, most outside plant (OSP) designs were done in AutoCAD, so it made sense to build OSP design tools around AutoCAD. However in making that choice, the OSP developer […]
“There are ratings and rankings that ostensibly exist to give us information (and we are supposed to use that information to change our behavior). But if we don’t know what variables matter, how is it supposed to be useful? Just because it can be easily measured with two digits doesn’t mean that it’s accurate, important […]
In a recent post, we described how changing conditions in networks (eg topologies, technologies, etc) cause us to reconsider our OSS. Networks always lead and OSS (or any form of network management including EMS/NMS) is always an afterthought. Often a distant afterthought. But what if we spun this around? What if OSS initiated change in […]
A few years ago, I read a book that had a big impact on the way I thought about OSS and OSS product development. Funnily enough, the book had nothing to do with OSS or product development. It was a book about marketing – a subject that I wasn’t very familiar with at the time, […]
