OSS Business Case Builder

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”
Sun Tzu

One of the great impediments of gaining key decision maker buy-in on a new OSS project is preparing a compelling business case. A majority of the benefits of an OSS are intangible, making quantification and business case justification a difficult task. The attached template provides a number of different approaches to justify the outlay of resources on your next OctopOSS.

OSS Business Case Builder

The business case includes nearly 40 OSS business case justification approaches, which tend to fall into four categories:

  • Revenue increase – the operationalisation and monetisation of an operator’s assets
  • Cost reduction – improving the operational efficiency of the operator
  • Insight generation – by leveraging the valuable data that an OSS collects
  • Brand value – this is a catch-all for many different ways an OSS can contribute to (or detract from) an operator’s brand. We can break this down into:
    • Defence (eg reducing outages that may damage the operator’s brand) or
    • Offence (eg faster time to market or activations that give the operator a competitive advantage)
  • But there’s one other special category that bears consideration – threat minimisation (or risk avoidance) – which probably has elements of each of the four points above. It is the insurance policy on people, processes, services and/or technologies that support the network that your OSS is managing. If we take a really macro-view of this, two of the biggest threats facing operators today are disruptive new business models and disruptive new products. Or, you could flip this on its head and see it as opportunity maximisation (if you’re the one to capitalise on the disruptive opportunity first)

 

If you find this template helpful, I’d love to hear about your story, your project and any other compelling factors that you’ve added to your business case.