Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
Do you work in a large organisation? Have you also worked in smaller organisations? Where have you felt more efficient? I’ve been lucky enough to work on some massive OSS transformations for large T1 telcos. But I’ve always noticed the inefficiency of working on these projects when embedded inside the bureaucracy of the beast. With […]
In the last two posts, we’ve discussed repeatability within the field of OSS implementation – paint-by-numbers vs artisans and then resilience vs precision in delivery practices. Now I’d like you to have a think about how those posts overlay onto this quote by Karl Popper: “Non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science.” Every […]
All OSS rely on workflows to make key outcomes happen. Outcomes like activating a customer order, resolving a fault, billing customers, etc. These workflows often touch multiple OSS/BSS products and/or functional capabilities. There’s not always a single-best-way to achieve an outcome. If you’re responsible for your organisation’s workflows do you want to build a paint-by-numbers […]
Have you ever experienced an epic customer experience (CX) fail when dealing a network service operator, like the one I described yesterday? In that example, the OSS/BSS, and possibly the associated people / process, had a direct impact on poor customer experience. Admittedly, that 7 truck-roll experience was a number of years ago now. We […]
In yesterday’s post we talked about the cost of quality. We talked about examples of primary, secondary and tertiary costs of bad data quality (DQ). We also highlighted that the tertiary costs, including the damage to brand reputation, can be one of the biggest factors. I often cite an example where it took 7 truck […]
This week of posts has followed the theme of the cost of quality. Data quality that is. But how do you calculate the cost of bad data quality? Yesterday’s post mentioned starting with PNI (Physical Network Inventory). PNI is the cables, splices / joints, patch panels, ducts, pits, etc. This data doesn’t tend to have […]
The diagram below has some parallels with OSS. The story however is a little long before it gets to the OSS part, so please bear with me. The diagram shows analysis the US Navy performed during WWII on where planes were being shot. The theory was that they should be reinforcing the areas that received […]
“This minimum feature set (sometimes called the “minimum viable product”) causes lots of confusion. Founders act like the “minimum” part is the goal. Or worse, that every potential customer should want it. In the real world not every customer is going to get overly excited about your minimum feature set. Only a special subset of […]
Today’s is something of a heretical post, especially for the believers in ITIL. In the world of OSS, we look to build in layers of resiliency and not layers of redundancy. The following diagram and subsequent text in italics describes a typical ITIL process and is all taken from https://www.computereconomics.com/article.cfm?id=1074 The sequence of events as shown […]
Have you noticed an increasing presence of open-source tools in your OSS recently? Have you also noticed that open-source is helping to trigger transformation? Have you thought about why that might be? Some might rightly argue that it is the cost factor. You could also claim that they tend to help resolve specific, but common, […]
You already know that speed is important for OSS users. They / we don’t want to wait for minutes for the OSS to respond to a simple query. That’s obvious right? The bleeding obvious. But that’s not what today’s post is about. So then, what is it about? Actually, it follows on from yesterday’s post […]
Friday’s post posed a re-framing exercise that asked you (whether customer, seller or integrator) to run a planning exercise as if you MUST offer a money-back guarantee on your OSS (whether internal or external). It’s designed to force a change in mindset from risk mitigation to risk removal. We have another re-framing exercise for you […]
We’ve talked about some of the emotions we experience in the OSS industry earlier this week, the trauma of OSS and anxiety relating to OSS. To avoid these types of miserable feelings, it’s human nature to seek to limit them. We over-analyse, we over-specify, we over-engineer, we over-document, we over-contract, we over-react, we over-estimate (nah, […]
About 6-8 years ago, I was becoming achingly aware that I’d passed well beyond an information overload (I-O) threshold. More information was reaching my brain each day than I was able to assimilate, process and archive. What to do? Well, I decided to stop reading newspapers and watching the news, in fact almost all television. […]
On Tuesday we pondered, “Would an OSS duopoly be a good thing?” It cited two examples of operating systems amongst other famous duopolies: Microsoft / Apple (PC operating systems) Google / Apple (smartphone operating systems) Yesterday we provided an example of why consolidation is so much more challenging for OSS companies than say for Coke […]
The products/vendors page here on PAOSS has a couple of hundred entries currently. We’re currently working on an extended list that will almost double the number on it. More news on that shortly. The level of fragmentation fascinates me, but if I’m completely honest, it probably disappoints me too. It’s great that it’s providing the […]
On Friday, we published a post entitled, “Think for a moment…” which posed the question of whether we might be better-served looking back at our most important existing features and streamlining them rather than inventing new features to solve that have little impact. Over the weekend, a promotional email landed in my inbox from Nightingale […]
“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions…, but rather by delivering a superior experience….” Ben Thompson, stratechery.com Think for a moment about the millions of developer hours that have gone into creating today’s OSS tools. Think also for […]
“There are some jobs that are only done by accredited professionals. And then there are most jobs, jobs that some people do for fun, now and then, perhaps in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s difficult to find your footing when you’re a logo designer, a comedian or a project manager. Because these are gigs […]
The first OSS project I worked on had a full-suite, single vendor solution. All products within the suite were integrated into a single database and that allowed their product developers to introduce a lot of cross-linking. That has its strengths and weaknesses. The second OSS suite I worked with came from one of the world’s […]
