I spent some time with a client going through their OSS/BSS yesterday. They’re an Australian telco with a primarily home-grown, browser-based OSS/BSS. One of its features was something I’ve never seen in an OSS/BSS before. But really quite subtle and cool.
They have four tiers of users:
All users have access to the same OSS/BSS, but just with different levels of functionality / visibility, of course.
Anyway, the feature that I thought was really cool was that the super-admins have access to what they call the masquerade function. It allows them to masquerade as any other user on the system without having to log-out / login to other accounts. This allows them to see exactly what each user is seeing and experience exactly what they’re experiencing (notwithstanding any platform or network access differences such as different browsers, response times, etc).
This is clearly helpful for issue resolution, but I feel it’s even more helpful for design, feature release and testing across different personas.
In my experience at least, OSS/BSS builders tend to focus on a primary persona (eg the end-user) and can overlook multi-persona design and testing. The masquerade function can make this task easier.
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