Category Archives: Vendor

Vendors provide the products that go into the OctopOSS soup

Making a basic assessment of OSS value

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“…as technology gets more complicated, it becomes more difficult for buyers to acquire the skills needed to make even a basic assessment of value. Without such an assessment, it’s hard to get a project going, and in particular hard to get one going the right way.”
Tom Nolle.

Have you noticed that over the last few years, OSS choice has proliferated, making project assessment more challenging? Previously, the COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) product solution dominated. That was already a challenge because there are hundreds to choose from (there are around 400 on our vendors page alone). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We now also have choices to make across factors such as:

  • Building OSS tools with open-source projects
  • An increasing amount of in-house development (as opposed to COTS implementations by the product’s vendors)
  • Smaller niche products that need additional integration
  • An increase in the number of “standards” that are seeking to solve traditional OSS/BSS problems (eg ONAP, ETSI’s ZSM, TM Forum’s ODA, etc, etc)
  • Revolutions from the IT world such as cloud, containerisation, virtualisation, etc

As Tom indicates in the quote above, the diversity of skills required to make these decisions is broadening. Broadening to the point where you generally need a large team to have suitable skills coverage to make even a basic assessment of value.

At Passionate About OSS, we’re seeking to address this in the following ways:

  • We have two development projects underway (more news to come)
    • One to simplify the vendor / product selection process
    • One to assist with up-skilling on open-source and IT tools to build modern OSS
  • In addition to existing pages / blogs, we’re assembling more content about “standards” evolution, which should appear on this blog in coming days
  • Use our “Finding an Expert” tool to match experts to requirements
  • And of course there are the variety of consultancy services we offer ranging from strategy, roadmap, project business case and vendor selection through to resource identification and implementation. Leave us a message on our contact page if you’d like to discuss more

The OSS “out of control” conundrum

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Over the years in OSS, I’ve spent a lot of my time helping companies create their OSS / BSS strategies and roadmaps. Sometimes clients come from the buy side (eg carriers, utilities, enterprise), other times clients come from the sell side (eg vendors, integrators). There’s one factor that seems to be most commonly raised by these clients, and it comes from both sides.

What is that one factor? Well, we’ll come back to what that factor is a little later, but let’s cover some background first.

OSS / BSS covers a fairly broad estate of functionality:
OSS and BSS overlaid onto the TAM

Even if only covering a simplified version of this map, very few suppliers can provide coverage of the entire estate. That infers two things:

  1. Integrations; and
  2. Relationships

If you’re from the buy-side, you need to manage both to build a full-function OSS/BSS suite. If you’re from the sell-side, you’re either forced into dealing with both (reactive) or sometimes you can choose to develop those to bring a more complete offering to market (proactive).

You will have noticed that both are double-ended. Integrations bring two applications / functions together. Relationships bring two organisations together.

This two-ended concept means there’s always a “far-side” that’s outside your control. It’s in our nature to worry about what’s outside our control. We tend to want to put controls around what we can’t control. Not only that, but it’s incumbent on us as organisation planners to put mitigation strategies in place.

Which brings us back to the one factor that is raised by clients on most occasions – substitution – how do we minimise our exposure to lock-in with an OSS product / service partner/s if our partnership deteriorates?

Well, here are some thoughts:

  1. Design your own architecture with product / partner substitution in mind (and regularly review your substitution plan because products are always evolving)
  2. Develop multiple integrations so that you always have active equivalency. This is easier for sell-side “reactives” because their different customers will have different products to integrate to (eg an OSS vendor that is able to integrate with four different ITSM tools because they have different customers with each of those variants)
  3. Enhance your own offerings so that you no longer require the partnership, but can do it yourself
  4. Invest in your partnerships to ensure they don’t deteriorate. This is the OSS marriage analogy where ongoing mutual benefits encourage the relationship to continue.

The 3 states of OSS consciousness

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The last four posts have discussed how our OSS/BSS need to cope with different modes of working to perform effectively. We started off with the thread of “group flow,” where multiple different users of our tools can work cohesively. Then we talked about how flow requires a lack of interruptions, yet many of the roles using our OSS actually need constant availability (ie to be constantly interrupted).

From a user experience (UI/UX) perspective, we need an awareness of the state the operator/s needs to be in to perform each step of an end-to-end process, be it:

  • Deep think or flow mode – where the operator needs uninterrupted time to resolve a complex and/or complicated activity (eg a design activity)
  • Constant availability mode – where the operator needs to quickly respond to the needs of others and therefore needs a stream of notifications / interruptions (eg network fault resolutions)
  • Group flow mode – where a group of operators need to collaborate effectively and cohesively to resolve a complex and/or complicated activity (eg resolve a cross-domain fault situation)

This is a strong argument for every OSS/BSS supplier to have UI/UX experts on their team. Yet most leave their UI/UX with their coders. They tend to take the perspective that if the function can be performed, it’s time to move on to building the next function. That was the same argument used by all MP3 player suppliers before the iPod came along with its beautiful form and function and dominated the market.

Interestingly, modern architectural principles potentially make UI/UX design more challenging. With old, monolithic OSS/BSS, you at least had more control over end-to-end workflows (I’m not suggesting we should go back to the monoliths BTW). These days, you need to accommodate the unique nuances / inconsistencies of third-party modules like APIs / microservices.

As Evan Linwood incisively identified, ” I guess we live in the age of cloud based API providers, theoretically enabling loads of pre-canned integration patterns but these may not be ideal for a large service provider… Definitely if the underlying availability isn’t there, but could also occur through things like schema mismanagement across multiple providers? (Which might actually be an argument for better management / B/OSS, rather than against the use of microservices!”

Am I convincing any of you to hire more UI/UX resources? Or convincing you to register for UI/UX as your next training course instead of learning a ninth programming language?

Put simply, we need your assistance to take our OSS from this…
Old MP3 player

To this…
iPod

Stealing Fire for OSS (part 2)

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Yesterday’s post talked about the difference between “flow state” and “office state” in relation to OSS delivery. It referenced a book I’m currently reading called Stealing Fire.

The post mainly focused on how the interruptions of “office state” actually inhibit our productivity, learning and ability to think laterally on our OSS. But that got me thinking that perhaps flow doesn’t just relate to OSS project delivery. It also relates to post-implementation use of the OSS we implement.

If we think about the various personas who use an OSS (such as NOC operators, designers, order entry operators, capacity planners, etc), do our user interfaces and workflows assist or inhibit them to get into the zone? More importantly, if those personas need to work collaboratively with others, do we facilitate them getting into “group flow?”

Stealing Fire suggests that it costs around $500k to train each Navy SEAL and around $4.25m to train each elite SEAL (DEVGRU). It also describes how this level of training allows DEVGRU units to quickly get into group flow and function together almost as if choreographed, even in high-pressure / high-noise environments.

Contrast this with collaborative activities within our OSS. We use tickets, emails, Slack notifications, work order activity lists, etc to collaborate. It seems to me that these are the precise instruments that prevent us from getting into flow individually. I assume it’s the same collectively. I can’t think back to any end-to-end OSS workflows that seem highly choreographed or seamlessly effective.

Think about it. If you experience significant rates of process fall-out / error, then it would seem to indicate an OSS that’s not conducive to group flow. Ditto for lengthy O2A (order to activate) or T2R (trouble to resolve) times. Ditto for bringing new products to market.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Has any OSS environment you’ve worked in facilitated group flow? If so, was it the people and/or the tools? Alternatively, have the OSS you’ve used inhibited group flow?

PS. Stealing Fire details how organisations such as Google and DARPA are investing heavily in flow research. They can obviously see the pay-off from those investments (or potential pay-offs). We seem to barely even invest in UI/UX experts to assist with the designs of our OSS products and workflows.

OSS change…. but not too much… oh no…..

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Let me start today with a question:
Does your future OSS/BSS need to be drastically different to what it is today?

Please leave me a comment below, answering yes or no.

I’m going to take a guess that most OSS/BSS experts will answer yes to this question, that our future OSS/BSS will change significantly. It’s the reason I wrote the OSS Call for Innovation manifesto some time back. As great as our OSS/BSS are, there’s still so much need for improvement.

But big improvement needs big change. And big change is scary, as Tom Nolle points out:
“IT vendors, like most vendors, recognize that too much revolution doesn’t sell. You have to creep up on change, get buyers disconnected from the comfortable past and then get them to face not the ultimate future but a future that’s not too frightening.”

Do you feel like we’re already in the midst of a revolution? Cloud computing, web-scaling and virtualisation (of IT and networks) have been partly responsible for it. Agile and continuous integration/delivery models too.

The following diagram shows a “from the moon” level view of how I approach (almost) any new project.

The key to Tom’s quote above is in step 2. Just how far, or how ambitious, into the future are you projecting your required change? Do you even know what that future will look like? After all, the environment we’re operating within is changing so fast. That’s why Tom is suggesting that for many of us, step 2 is just a “creep up on it change.” The gap is essentially small.

The “creep up on it change” means just adding a few new relatively meaningless features at the end of the long tail of functionality. That’s because we’ve already had the most meaningful functionality in our OSS/BSS for decades (eg customer management, product / catalog management, service management, service activation, network / service health management, inventory / resource management, partner management, workforce management, etc). We’ve had the functionality, but that doesn’t mean we’ve perfected the cost or process efficiency of using it.

So let’s say we look at step 2 with a slightly different mindset. Let’s say we don’t try to add any new functionality. We lock that down to what we already have. Instead we do re-factoring and try to pull the efficiency levers, which means changes to:

  1. Platforms (eg cloud computing, web-scaling and virtualisation as well as associated management applications)
  2. Methodologies (eg Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, noting of course that they’re more than just methodologies, but also come with tools, etc)
  3. Process (eg User Experience / User Interfaces [UX/UI], supply chain, business process re-invention, machine-led automations, etc)

It’s harder for most people to visualise what the Step 2 Future State looks like. And if it’s harder to envisage Step 2, how do we then move onto Steps 3 and 4 with confidence?

This is the challenge for OSS/BSS vendors, supplier, integrators and implementers. How do we, “get buyers disconnected from the comfortable past and then get them to face not the ultimate future but a future that’s not too frightening?” And I should point out, that it’s not just buyers we need to get disconnected from the comfortable past, but ourselves, myself definitely included.

Two concepts to help ease long-standing OSS problems

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There’s a famous Zig Ziglar quote that goes something like, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

You could safely assume that this was written for the individual reader, but there is some truth in it within the OSS context too. For the OSS designer, builder, integrator, does the statement “You can have everything in your OSS you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want,” apply?

We often just think about the O in OSS – Operations people, when looking for who to help. But OSS/BSS has the ability to impact far wider than just the Ops team/s.

The halcyon days of OSS were probably in the 1990’s to early 2000’s when the term OSS/BSS was at its most sexy and exciting. The big telcos were excitedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Those projects were huge… and hugely complex… and hugely fun!

With that level of investment, there was the expectation that the OSS/BSS would help many people. And they did. But the lustre has come off somewhat since then. We’ve helped sooooo many people, but perhaps didn’t help enough people enough. Just speak with anybody involved with an OSS/BSS stack and you’ll hear hints of a large gap that exists between their current state and a desired future state.

Do you mind if I ask two questions?

  1. When you reflect on your OSS activities, do you focus on the technology, the opportunities or the problems
  2. Do you look at the local, day-to-day activities or the broader industry

I tend to find myself focusing on the problems – how to solve them within the daily context on customer challenges, but the broader industry problems when I take the time to reflect, such as writing these blogs.

The part I find interesting is that we still face most of the same problems today that we did back in the 1990’s-2000’s. The same source of risks. We’ve done a fantastic job of helping many people get what they want on their day-to-day activities (the incremental). We still haven’t cracked the big challenges though. That’s why I wrote the OSS Call for Innovation, to articulate what lays ahead of us.

It’s why I’m really excited about two of the concepts we’ve discussed this week:

Could you believe it? An OSS with less features that helps more?

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All OSS products are excellent these days. And all OSS vendors know what the most important functionality is. They already have those features built into their products. That is, they’ve already added the all-important features at the left side of the graph.
Long-tail features

But it also means product teams are tending to only add the relatively unimportant new features to the right edge of the graph (ie inside the red box). Relatively unimportant and therefore delivering minimal differential advantage.

The challenge for users is that there is a huge amount of relatively worthless functionality that they have to navigate around. This tends to make the user interfaces non-intuitive.

In a previous post, we mentioned that it’s the services wrapper where OSS suppliers have the potential to differentiate.

But another approach, a product-led differentiator, dawned on me when discussing the many sources of OSS friction in yesterday’s post. What if we asked our product teams to take a focus on designing solutions that remove friction instead of the typical approach of adding features (and complexity)?

Almost every OSS I’m aware of has many areas of friction. It’s what gives the OSS industry a bad name. But what if one vendor reduced friction to levels far less than any other competitor? Would it be a differentiator? I’m quite certain customers would be lining up to buy a frictionless OSS even if it didn’t have every perceivable feature.

But can it work? What do you think?

Is your OSS squeaking like an un-oiled bearing?

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Network operators spend huge amounts on building and maintaining their OSS/BSS every year. There are many reasons they invest so heavily, but in most cases it can be distilled back to one thing – improving operational efficiency.

And our OSS/BSS definitely do improve operational efficiency, but there are still so many sources of friction. They’re squeaking like un-oiled bearings. Here are just a few of the common sources:

  1. First-time Installation
  2. Identifying best-fit tools
  3. Procurement of new tools
  4. Update / release processes
  5. Continuous data quality / consistency improvement
  6. Navigating to all features through the user interface
  7. Non-intuitive functionality / processes
  8. So many variants / complexity that end-users take years to attain expert-level capability
  9. Integration / interconnect
  10. Getting new starters up to speed
  11. Getting proficient operators to expertise
  12. Unlocking actionable insights from huge data piles
  13. Resolving the root-cause of complex faults
  14. Onboarding new customers
  15. Productionising new functionality
  16. Exception and fallout handling
  17. Access to supplier expertise to resolve challenges

The list goes on far deeper than that list too. The challenge for many OSS product teams, for any number of reasons, is that their focus is on adding new features rather than reducing friction in what already exists.

The challenge for product teams is diagnosing where the friction  and risks are for their customers / stakeholders. How do you get that feedback?

  • Every vendor has a product support team, so that’s a useful place to start, both in terms of what’s generating the most support calls and in terms of first-hand feedback from customers
  • Do you hold user forums on a regular basis, where you get many of your customers together to discuss their challenges, your future roadmap, new improvements / features
  • Does your process “flow” data show where the sticking points are for operators
  • Do you conduct gemba walks with your customers
  • Do you have a program of ensuring all developers spend at least a few days a year interacting directly with customers on their site/s
  • Do you observe areas of difficulty when delivering training
  • Do you go out of your way to ask your customers / stakeholders questions that are framed around their pain-points, not just framed within the context of your existing OSS
  • Do you conduct customer surveys? More importantly, do you conduct surveys through an independent third-party?

On the last dot-point, I’ve been surprised at some of the profound insights end-users have shared with me when I’ve been conducting these reviews as the independent interviewer. I’ve tended to find answers are more open / honest when being delivered to an independent third-party than if the supplier asks directly. If you’d like assistance running a third-party review, leave us a note on the contact page. We’d be delighted to assist.

About the OSS that transmits on radio station WIIFM

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Nobody is interested in you, your brand or your OSS.

Well, that’s a big negative and confrontational statement isn’t it? You’re probably thinking I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning and took a big handful of emo pills.

The reality is, all of our customers and colleagues are walking around tuned into radio station WIIFM (What’s in it for me?), so it’s our job to transmit on that wavelength if we expect to be heard.

The example I’d like to talk about today is the OSS NASCAR page. You know the page don’t you? It’s the one in the vendor’s deck that contains logos of all their past customers. It looks a little like the image below, but without the Goodyear tyre hopefully.
Sponsors emblazened on the side of a NASCAR

The NASCAR page is a great social proof persuasion technique, one that shows all the other clever customers who have signed with this vendor… and therefore you should too. But like Spiderman, my cynic senses start tingling when I see a page like this. Of the full page of past clients, it’s likely that very few of those logos represent a scope that resembles my OSS needs. Many are probably using different OSS product mixes, processes, data sources, etc.

The thing I find interesting is that in all the years of seeing vendor presentations like this, I can only ever recall a couple of presentations that ever took the NASCAR page to the next level. That is, to select 2 or 3 of those logos and dive into detail to show how they were similar to my project and demonstrate how they had solved my problems on those projects previously.

That one little step tells me the vendor is not just using a standard presentation deck, but has truly moulded it for presentation on station WIIFM.

And I should point out here that the WIIFM technique is not just relevant to vendors. Not by any stretch. It surely has relevance to your situation too. For example, if you’re building an OSS for internal customers, are you ensuring that it’s built and communicated at their wavelength?

What’s your experience? Leave me a comment below to share your experience of the OSS industry:

  • WIIFM – if you feel the OSS market transmits on your wavelength and addresses your problems
  • IAAT (It’s all about themselves) – if you feel the OSS market only transmits on the wavelength that’s important to them

Would you hire a furniture maker as an OSS CEO?

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Well, would you hire a furniture maker as CEO of an OSS vendor?

At face value, it would seem to be an odd selection right? There doesn’t seem to be much commonality between furniture and OSS does there? It seems as likely as hiring a furniture maker to be CEO of a car maker?

Oh wait. That did happen.

Ford Motor Company made just such a decision last year when appointing Jim Hackett, a furniture industry veteran, as its CEO. Whether the appointment proves successful or not, it’s interesting that Ford made the decision. But why? To focus on user experience and design as it’s next big differentiator. Clever line of thinking Bill Ford!!

I’ve prepared a slightly light-hearted table for comparison purposes between cars and OSS. Both are worth comparing as they’re both complex feats of human engineering:

Idx Comparison Criteria Car OSS
1 Primary objective Transport passengers between destinations Operationalise and monetise a comms network
2 Claimed “Business” justification Personal freedom Reducing the cost of operations
3 Operation of common functionality without conscious thought (developed through years of operator practice) Steering

Changing gears

Indicating

 Hmmm??? Depends on which sales person or operator you speak with
4 Error detection and current-state monitoring Warning lights and instrument cluster/s Alarm lists, performance graphs
5 Key differentiator for customers (1970’s) Engine size Database / CPU size
6 Key differentiator for customers (2000’s) Gadgets / functions / cup-holders Functionality
7 Key differentiator for customers (2020+) User Experience

Self-driving

Connected car (car as an “experience platform”)

 User Experience??

Zero-touch assurance?

Connected OSS (ie OSS as an experience platform)???

I’d like to focus on three key areas next:

  1. Item 3
  2. Item 4 and
  3. The transition between items 6 and 7

Item 3 – operating on auto-pilot

If we reference against item 1, the primary objective, experienced operators of cars can navigate from point A to point B with little conscious thought. Key activities such as steering, changing gears and Indicating can be done almost as a background task by our brains whilst doing other mental processing (talking, thinking, listening to podcasts, etc).

Experienced operators of OSS can do primary objectives quickly, but probably not on auto-pilot. There are too many “levers” to pull, too many decisions to make, too many options to choose from, for operators to background-process key OSS activities. The question is, could we re-architect to achieve key objectives more as background processing tasks?

Item 4 – error detection and monitoring

In a car, error detection is also a background task, where operators are rarely notified, only for critical alerts (eg engine light, fuel tank empty, etc). In an OSS, error detection is not a background task. We need full-time staff monitoring all the alarms and alerts popping up on our consoles! Sometimes they scroll off the page too fast for us to even contemplate.

In a car, monitoring is kept to the bare essentials (speedo, tacho, fuel guage, etc). In an OSS, we tend to be great at information overload – we have a billion graphs and are never sure which ones, or which thresholds, actually allow us to operate our “vehicle” effectively. So we show them all.

Transitioning from current to future-state differentiators

In cars, we’ve finally reached peak-cup-holders. Manufacturers know they can no longer differentiate from competitors just by having more cup-holders (at least, I think this claim is true). They’ve also realised that even entry-level cars have an astounding list of features that are only supplementary to the primary objective (see item 1). They now know it’s not the amount of functionality, but how seamlessly and intuitively the users interact with the vehicle on end-to-end tasks. The car is now seen as an extension of the user’s phone rather than vice versa, unlike the recent past.

In OSS, I’ve yet to see a single cup holder (apart from the old gag about CD trays). Vendors mark that down – cup holders could be a good differentiator. But seriously, I’m not sure if we realise the OSS arms race of features is no longer the differentiator. Intuitive end-to-end user experience can be a huge differentiator amongst the sea of complex designs, user interfaces and processes available currently. But nobody seems to be talking about this. Go to any OSS event and we only hear from engineers talking about features. Where are the UX experts talking about innovative new ways for users to interact with machines to achieve primary objectives (see item 1)?

But a functionality arms race isn’t a completely dead differentiator. In cars, there is a horizon of next-level features that can be true differentiators like self-driving or hover-cars. Likewise in OSS, incremental functionality increases aren’t differentiators. However, any vendor that can not just discuss, but can produce next-level capabilities like zero touch assurance (ZTA) and automated O2A (Order to Activate) will definitely hold a competitive advantage.

Hat tip to Jerry Useem, whose article on Atlantic provided the idea seed for this OSS post.

Do you wish more people fell in love with your OSS?

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I’d hazard a guess that everyone reading this would admit to being a techie at some level. And being a techie, I’d also imagine that you have blatant tech-love for certain products – gadgets, apps, sites, whatever.

But, let me ask you, are there any OSS products on your love-interest list?

If yes, leave me a comment of “yes” and name of the product below.
If no, leave me a comment of “no” below.

I’m really interested and intrigued to see your answer.

There’s probably only one OSS that I’ve ever had a tech-crush on (but it’s no longer available on the market). It definitely wasn’t love at first sight. If I’m honest, it was probably the opposite. It was a love that took a long time to build. It had some cool modules, but generally it was a bit clunky. The real attraction was that the power and elegance of its data model allowed me to do almost anything with it. To build almost anything with it. To answer almost any business / network / operation question that I could dream up.

I wonder whether the same is true of your other tech-loves? Do they provide the platform for us to create/achieve things that we never dreamed we’d be able to?

If that’s true, I wonder then whether that’s one key to solving the header question?

I wonder whether the other key (the second authentication factor) is in the speed that a user can achieve the necessary level of expertise? Few users ever have the luxury that I had, spending every day for years, to establish the required expertise to make that OSS excel.

As Seth Godin says, “Make things better by making better things.”

PS. If you were kind enough to leave a Yes or No comment below, I’d also love to hear why in an additional comment.

OSS orgitecture

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So far this week we’ve been focusing on ways to improve the OSS transformation process. Monday provided 7 models for achieving startup-like efficiency for larger OSS transformations. Tuesday provided suggestions for speeding up the transition from OSS PoC to getting the solution into production, specifically strategies for absorbing an OSS PoC into production.

Both of these posts talk about the speed of getting things done outside the bureaucracy of big operators, big networks and big OSS. Today, as the post title suggests, we’re going to look at orgitecture – how re-designing the structure and culture of an organisation can help streamline digital transformations.

Do you agree with the premise that smaller entities (eg Agile autonomous groups, partners, consultants, etc) can get OSS tasks done more efficiently when operating at arms-length of the larger entity (eg the carrier)? I believe that this is a first principle of physics at play.

If you’ve worked under this arms-length arrangement in the past, you’ll also know that at some point those delivery outcomes need to get integrated back into the big entity. It’s what we referred to yesterday as absorption, where the level of integration effort falls on a continuum between minimally absorbed to fully absorbed.

OSS orgitecture is the re-architecture of the people, processes, culture and org structure to better allow for the absorption process. In the past, all the safety-checks (eg security, approvals, ops handover, etc) were designed on the assumption that internal teams were doing the work. They’re not always a great fit, especially when it comes to documentation review and approval.

For example, I have a belief that the effectiveness of documentation review and approval is inversely proportional to the number of reviewers (in most, but not all cases). Unfortunately, when an external entity is delivering, there tends to be inherently less trust than if an internal entity was delivering. As such, the safety-checks increase.

Another example is when the large organisation uses Agile delivery models, but use supply partners to deliver scope of works. The partners are able to assign effort in a sequential / waterfall manner, but can be delayed by only getting timeslices of attention from client’s staff (ie resources are available according to Agile sprint planning).

Security and cutover planning mechanisms such as Change Review Boards (CRB) have also been designed around old internal delivery models. They also need to be reconsidered to facilitate a pipeline of externally-implemented change.

Perhaps the biggest orgitecture factor is in getting multiple internal business units to work together effectively. In the old world we needed all the business units to reach consensus for a new product to come to market. Sales/Marketing/Products had to work with OSS/IT and Networks. Each of these units tend to have vastly different cultures and different cadences for getting their tasks done. Delivering a new product was as much an organisational challenge as it was a technical challenge and often took months. Those times-to-market are not feasible in a world of software where competitive advantages are fleeting. External entities can potentially help or hinder these timeframes. Careful design of small autonomous teams have the potential to improve abstraction at the interlocks, but culture remains the potential roadblock.

I’m excited by the opportunity for OSS delivery improvement coming from leveraging the gig economy. But if big OSS transformations are to make use of these efficiency gains, then we may also need to consider culture and process refinement as part of the change management.

Speeding up your OSS transition from PoC to PROD

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In yesterday’s article, we discussed 7 models for achieving startup-like efficiency on large OSS transformations.

One popular approach is to build a proof-of-concept or sandpit quickly on cloud hosting or in lab environments. It’s fast for a number of reasons including reduced number of approvals, faster activation of infrastructure, reduced safety checks (eg security, privacy, etc), minimised integration with legacy systems and many other reasons. The cloud hosting business model is thriving for all of these reasons.

However, it’s one thing to speed up development of an OSS PoC and another entirely to speed up deployment to a PROD environment. As soon as you wish to absorb the PoC-proven solution back into PROD, all the items listed above (eg security sign-offs) come back into play. Something that took days/weeks to stand up in PoC now takes months to productionise.

Have you noticed that the safety checks currently being used were often defined for the old world? They often aren’t designed with transition from cloud to PROD in mind. Similarly, the culture of design cross-checks and approvals can also be re-framed (especially when the end-to-end solution crosses multiple different business units). Lastly, and way outside my locus of competence, is in re-visiting security / privacy / deployment / etc models to facilitate easier transition.

One consideration to make is just how much absorption is required. For example, there are examples of services being delivered to the large entity’s subscribers by a smaller, external entity. The large entity then just “clips-the-ticket,” gaining a revenue stream with limited involvement. But the more common (and much more challenging) absorption model is for the partner to fold the solution back into the large entity’s full OSS/BSS stack.

So let’s consider your opportunity in terms of the absorption continuum that ranges between:

clip-the-ticket (minimally absorbed) <-----------|-----------> folded-in (fully absorbed)

Perhaps it’s feasible for your opportunity to fit somewhere in between (partially absorbed)? Perhaps part of that answer resides in the cloud model you decide to use (public, private, hybrid, cloud-managed private cloud) as well as the partnership model?

Modularity and reduced complexity (eg integrations) are also a factor to consider (as always).

I haven’t seen an ideal response to the absorption challenge yet, but I believe the solution lies in re-framing corporate culture and technology stacks. We’ll look at that in more detail tomorrow.

How about you? Have you or your organisation managed to speed up your transition from PoC to PROD? What techniques have you found to be successful?

Seven OSS transformation efficiency models

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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 all of the documentation, sign-offs, meetings, politics, gaining consensus, budget allocations, etc it can sometimes feel so inefficient. On some past projects, I’ve felt I can accomplish more in a day outside than a week or more inside the beast.

This makes sense when applying the fundamental law of physics F = M x a to OSS projects. In other words, the greater the mass (of the organisation), the more force must be applied to reach a given acceleration (ie to effect a change).

It’s one of the reasons I love working within a small entity (Passionate About OSS), but into big entities (the big telcos and utilities). It’s also why I strongly believe that the big entities need to better leverage smaller working groups to facilitate big OSS change. Not just OSS transformation, but any project where the size of the culture and technology stack are prohibitive.

Here are a few ways you can use to bring a start-up’s efficiency to a big OSS transformation:

  1. Agile methodologies – If done well, Agile can be great at breaking transformations down into smaller, more manageable pieces. The art is in designing small autonomous teams / responsibilities and breakdown of work to minimise dependencies
  2. Partnerships – Using smaller, external partners to deliver outcomes (eg product builds or service offerings) that can be absorbed into the big organisation. There are varying levels of absorption here – from an external, “clip-the-ticket” offering to offerings that are fully absorbed into the large entity’s OSS/BSS stack
  3. Consultancies – Similar to partnerships, but using smaller teams to implement professional services
  4. Spin-out / spin-in teams – Separating small teams of experts out from the bureaucracy of the large organisation so that they can achieve rapid progress
  5. Smart contracts / RFPs – I love the potential for smart contracts to automate the offer of small chunks of work to trusted partners to bid upon and then deliver upon
  6. Externalised Proofs of Concept (PoC) – One of the big challenges in implementing for large organisations is all of the safety checks that slow progress. Many, such as security and privacy mechanisms, are completely justified for a production network. But when a concept needs to be proved, such as user journeys, product integrations, sand-pit environments, etc, then cloud-based PoCs can be brilliant
  7. Alternate brands – Have you also noticed that some of the tier-1 telcos have been spinning out low-cost and/or niche brands with much leaner OSS/BSS stacks, offerings and related culture lately? It’s a clever business model on many levels. Combined with the strangler fig transformation approach, this might just represent a pathway for the big brand to shed many of their OSS/BSS legacy constraints

Can you think of other models that I’ve missed?

The key to these strategies is not so much the carve-out, the process of getting small teams to do tasks efficiently, but the absorb-in process. For example, how to absorb a cloud-based PoC back into the PROD network, where all safety checks (eg security, privacy, operations acceptance, etc) still need to be performed. More on that in tomorrow’s post.

OSS Best Practices, cough, splutter

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“Organizations that seek transformations frequently bring in an army of outside consultants [or implementers in the case of OSS] who tend to apply one-size-fits-all solutions in the name of “best practices.” Our approach to transforming our respective organizations is to rely instead on insiders — staff who have intimate knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in their daily operations.”
Behnam Tabrizi, Ed Lam, Kirk Gerard and Vernon Irvin here

I don’t know about you, but the term “best practices” causes me make funny noises. A cross between a laugh, cough, derisive snicker and chortle. This noise isn’t always audible, but it definitely sounds inside my head any time someone mentions best practices in the field of OSS.

There are two reasons for my bemusement, no, actually there’s a third, which I’ll share as the story that follows. The first two reasons are:

  • That every OSS project is so different that chaos theory applies. I’m all for systematising aspects of OSS projects to create repeatable building blocks (like TM Forum does with tools such as eTOM). But as much as I build and use repeatable approaches, I know they always have to be customised for each client situation
  • Best practices becomes a mind-set that can prevent the outsiders / implementers from listening to insiders

Luckily, out of all the OSS projects I’ve worked on, there’s only been one where the entire implementation team has stuck with their “best practices” mantra throughout the project.

The team used this phrase as the intellectual high-ground over their OSS-novice clients. To paraphrase their words, “This is best practice. We’ve done it this way successfully for dozens of customers in the past, so you must do it our way.” Interestingly, this project was the most monumental failure of any OSS I’ve worked on.

The implementation team’s organisation lost out because the project was halted part-way through. The client lost out because they had almost no OSS functionality to show for their resource investment.

The project was canned largely because the implementation company wasn’t prepared to budge from their “best practices” thinking. To be honest, their best practices approaches were quite well formed. The only problem was that the changes they were insisting on (to accommodate their 10-person team of outsiders) would’ve caused major re-organisation of the client’s 100,000-person company of insiders. The outsiders / implementers either couldn’t see that or were so arrogant that they wanted the client to bend anyway.

That was a failure on their behalf no doubt, but not the monumental failure. I could see the massive cultural disconnect between client and implementer very early. I could even see the way to fix it (I believe). I was their executive advisor (the bridge between outsiders and insiders) so the monumental failure was mine. Not through lack of trying, I was unable to persuade either party to consider the other’s perspective.

Without compromise, the project became compromised.

All OSS products are excellent. So where’s the advantage?

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“You don’t get differential advantage from your products, it’s from the way you speak to and relate to your customers . All products are excellent these days.”

The quote above paraphrases Malcolm McDonald from a podcast about his book, “Malcolm McDonald on Value Propositions: How to Develop Them, How to Quantify Them.”

This quote had nothing to do with OSS specifically, but consider for a moment how it relates to OSS.

Consider also in relation to the diagram below.
Long-tail features

Let’s say the x-axis on this graph shows a list of features within any given OSS product. And the y-axis shows a KPI that measures the importance of each feature (eg number of uses, value added by using that feature, etc).

As Professor McDonald indicates, all OSS products are excellent these days. And all product vendors know what the most important features are. As a result, they all know they must offer the features that appear on the left-side of the image. Since all vendors do the left-side, it seems logical to differentiate by adding features to the far-right of the image, right?

Well actually, there’s almost no differential advantage at the far-right of the image.

Now what if we consider the second part of Prof McDonald’s statement on differential advantage, “…it’s from the way you speak to and relate to your customers.”

To me it implies that the differential advantage in OSS is not in the products, but in the service wrapper that is placed around it. You might be saying, “but we’re an OSS product company. We don’t want to get into services.” As described in this earlier post, there are two layers of OSS services.

One of the layers mentioned is product-related services (eg product installation, product configuration, product release management, license management, product training, data migration, product efficiency / optimisation, etc). None of these items would appear as features on the long-tail diagram above. Perhaps as a result, it’s these items that are often less than excellent in vendor offerings. It’s often in these items where complexity, time, cost and risk are added to an OSS project, increasing stress for clients.

If Prof McDonald is correct and all OSS products are excellent, then perhaps it’s in the services wrapper where the true differential advantage is waiting to be unlocked. This will come from spending more time relating to customers than cutting more code.

What if we take it a step further? What if we seek to better understand our clients’ differential advantages in their markets? Perhaps this is where we will unlock an entirely different set of features that will introduce new bands on the left-side of the image. I still feel that amazing OSS/BSS can give carriers significant competitive advantage in their marketplace. And the converse can give significant competitive disadvantage!

Are you desperately seeking to increase your OSS‘s differential advantage? Contact us at Passionate About OSS to help map out a way.

The OSS Tinder effect

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On Friday, we provided a link to an inspiring video showing Rolls-Royce’s vision of an operations centre. That article is a follow-on from other recent posts about to pros and cons of using MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) as an OSS transformation approach.

I’ve been lucky to work on massive OSS projects. Projects that have taken months / years of hard implementation grind to deliver an OSS for clients. One was as close to perfect (technically) as I’ve been involved with. But, alas, it proved to be a failure.

How could that be you’re wondering? Well, it’s what I refer to as the Tinder Effect. On Tinder, first appearances matter. Liked or disliked at the swipe of a hand.

Many new OSS are delivered to users who are already familiar with one or more OSS. If they’re not as pretty or as functional or as intuitive as what the users are accustomed to, then your OSS gets a swipe to the left. As we found out on that project (a ‘we’ that included all the client’s stakeholders and sponsors), first impressions can doom an otherwise successful OSS implementation.

Since then, I’ve invested a lot more time into change management. Change management that starts long before delivery and handover. Long before designs are locked in. Change management that starts with hearts and minds. And starts by involving the end users early in the change process. Getting them involved in the vision, even if not quite as elaborate as Rolls-Royce’s.

An OSS theatre of combat

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Have you sat on both sides of the OSS procurement process? That is, been an OSS buyer (eg writing an RFP) and an OSS seller (eg responded to an RFP) on separate projects?

Have you noticed the amount of brain-power allocated to transferral of risk from both angles?

If you’re the buyer, you seek to transfer risk to the seller through clever RFP clauses.
If you’re the seller, you seek to transfer risk to the buyer through exclusions, risk margins, etc in your RFP response.

We openly collaborate on features during the RFP, contract formation, design and implementation phases. We’re open to finding the optimal technical solution throughout those phases.

But when it comes to risk, it’s bordering on passive-aggressive behaviour when you think about it. We’re also not so transparent or collaborative about risk in the pre-implementation phases. That increases the likelihood of combative risk / issue management during the implementation phase.

The trusting long-term relationship that both parties wish to foster starts off with a negative undercurrent.

The reality is that OSS projects carry significant risk. Both sides carry a large risk burden. It seems like we could be as collaborative on risks as we are on requirements and features.

Thoughts?

OSS transformation is hard. What can we learn from open source?

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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, problems. They’re smaller and modular.

I’d argue that the reason relates to our most recent two blog posts. They’re fast to install (don’t need to get bogged down in procurement) and they’re easy to run in parallel for comparison purposes.

If you’re designing an OSS can you introduce the same concepts? Your OSS might be for internal purposes or to sell to market. Either way, if you make it fast to build and easy to use, you have a greater chance of triggering transformation.

If you have a behemoth OSS to “sell,” transformation persuasion is harder. The customer needs to rally more resources (funds, people, time) just to compare with what they already have. If you have a behemoth on your hands, you need to try even harder to be faster, easier and more modular.

I have the need for OSS speed

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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 about re-framing of OSS transformation.  If a parallel pilot OSS can be stood up in weeks then it helps persuasion. If the OSS is also fast for operators to learn, then it helps persuasion.  Why is that important? How can speed help with persuasion?

Put simply:

  • It takes x months of uncertainty out of the evaluators’ lives
  • It takes x months of parallel processing out of the evaluators’ lives
  • It also takes x months of task-switching out of the evaluators’ lives
  • Given x months of their lives back, customers will be more easily persuaded

It also helps with the parallel bake-off if your pilot OSS shows a speed improvement.

Whether we’re the buyer or seller in an OSS pilot, it’s incumbent upon us to increase speed.

You may ask how. Many ways, but I’d start with a mass-simplification exercise.