Re-framing an OSS replacement strategy

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 today.

As we all know, incumbent OSS can be really difficult to replace / usurp. It becomes a massive exercise for a customer to change the status quo. And when you’re on the team that’s trying to instigate change (again whether you’re internal or external to the OSS customer organisation), you want to minimise the barriers to change.

The ideal replacement approach is to put a parallel pilot in place (which also bears some similarity with the strangler fig analogy). Unfortunately the pilot approach doesn’t get used as often as it could because pilot implementation projects tend to take months to stand up. This implies significant effort and cost, which in turn implies a major procurement event needs to occur.

If the parallel pilot could be stood-up in days or a couple of weeks, then it becomes a more useful replacement persuasion strategy.

So today’s re-framing exercise is to ask yourself what you could do to stand up a pilot version of your OSS in only days/weeks and at very little cost?

Let me add an extra twist to that exercise. When I say stand up the OSS in days/weeks, I also mean to hand over to the users, which means that it has to be intuitive enough for operators to begin using with almost no training. Don’t forget that the parallel solution is unlikely to have additional resources to operate it. It’s likely that the same workforce will need to operate incumbent and pilot, performing a comparison.

So, what you could do to stand up a pilot version of your OSS in only days/weeks, at very little cost and with almost immediate take-up by users?

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