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
“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, […]
“There are three broad models of networking in use today. The first is the adaptive model where devices exchange peer information to discover routes and destinations. This is how IP networks, including the Internet, work. The second is the static model where destinations and pathways (routes) are explicitly defined in a tabular way, and the […]
There’s something I’ve noticed about OSS products – they are either designed to be abstract / flexible or they are designed to cater for specific technologies / topologies. When designed from the abstract perspective, the tools are built around generic core data models. For example, whether a virtual / logical device, a physical device, a […]
“Even aside from the OSS impact, it illustrates the contrast between “bottom-up” planning of networks (new card X is cheaper/has more ports) and “top down” (what do we need to change to reduce our costs/increase capacity).” Robert Curran. Robert’s quote above is in response to a post called “Trickle-down impact planning.” Robert makes a really […]
When your ideas get stolen. A few meditations from Seth Godin: “Good for you. Isn’t it better that your ideas are worth stealing? What would happen if you worked all that time, created that book or that movie or that concept and no one wanted to riff on it, expand it or run with it? […]
“Brand, marketing, pricing and sales were seen as sexy. Networks and IT were the geeks no one seemed to speak to or care about. … This isolation and excommunication of our technical team had created an environment of disillusion. If you wanted something done the answer was mostly ‘No – we have no budget and […]
Our most recent two posts, from yesterday and Friday, have talked about one stunningly simple idea that helps to overcome one of OSS’ biggest challenges – data quality. Those posts have stimulated quite a bit of dialogue and it seems there is some consensus about the cleverness of the idea. I don’t know if the […]
Looking back, I now consider myself extremely lucky to have worked with an amazing product on the first OSS project I worked on (all the way back in 2000). And I say amazing because the underlying data models and core product architecture are still better than any other I’ve worked with in the two decades […]
Further to yesterday’s post that posed the question about whether your data was AI ready for virtualised network assurance use cases, I thought I’d raise a few more notes. The two reasons posed were: Our data sets haven’t had time to collect much elastic / dynamic network data yet Our data is riddled with human-generated […]
“Most people know what they want, but don’t know how to get it. When you don’t know the next step, you procrastinate or feel lost. But a little research can turn a vague desire into specific actions. For example: When musicians say, “I need a booking agent”, I ask, “Which one? What’s their name?” You […]
