IIM Telecom Institute -
Telecom Management Best Practices
A Case Study
Building a Strategic Competitive Advantage via
Experiential Action Learning
The Client: AT&T Wireless - One of the largest
wireless telecoms in the world with more than 20 million subscribers.
The Services: Consulting. Organizational
Development.
Training
- Telecom lifecycle change management
- Telecom management best practices
- Business process improvement
- Enterprise knowledge management
- Operational support and project management
- Customized management and technical training courses
The Challenge:
The client was facing major challenges to grow its market share,
overcome customer churn and manage its national network operations and
customer service levels due to the large-scale upgrades of their telecom from 2G to 3G
infrastructure.
Strong competitive forces resulted in launching hundreds
of new technology and operational change projects with limited internal
resources. The employees were pressured to execute more projects, faster, with fewer
resources. The operational environment was complex; it consisted of thousands of
technologies, circuits, vendors, employees, and processes undergoing change
at the same time.
The
number one management challenge was the size and speed of change. The
VP of National Operations needed a new operational framework to streamline
internal processes and to manage the rapid growth and integration of network
elements. He also wanted
to develop cross-functional collaboration to leverage the knowledge and skills
across various departments (Voice, Data, Value Added Services, Ecommerce,
SMS, Multimedia, Radio, NGN, etc.).
Initially the client sought an independent expert with strong technical
and managerial background to help them bridge the knowledge and
communication gap between various groups and to identify specific
improvement areas and recommend solutions based on industry best practices.
The Project:
The senior management team understood that in highly competitive and
rapidly changing industries, operational speed and execution excellence are
the only sustainable competitive advantage.
The VP of Operations knew that teams that learn together, work better
together. The project sponsor was not interested in generic training
courses, because they did not address the critical knowledge-implementation
gap. The vendor training courses were also limited to their products
and could not provide the required end-to -end view.
Quoting Confucius, one
manager said "We do not want fish; we want to learn how to fish. We do not
want a consulting firm to come and fix some of the problems, then after one year the
technology changes and we have to go through the same operational challenges
all over again". The client realized that the best strategy to develop core
competencies and to speed up the enterprise transformation initiative was
through experiential learning and development models. A new partnership was
needed to support the management team in enterprise capacity building.
The client asked IIM to capture the enterprise telecom knowledge and to
develop its intellectual capital by sharing telecom best practices with
various teams. IIM designed and delivered the customized curriculum for the
client. The consultant advised and supported various management layers.
They also facilitated
collaboration and experiential learning sessions between various functional
teams.
The Solution:
An IIM consultant provided rapid analysis of the business, operational
and technical environment and shared with the senior management team the
emerging telecom trends, opportunities, best practices, frameworks and tools
to help them achieve their goals. Having seen similar issues with other
Global Fortune 1000 companies across various industries, the consultant
suggested that the best solution to overcome the client's growing pains and
continuously changing competitive environment is to adopt the following
recommendations:
-
Implement tighter integration and collaboration across the telecom management
lifecycle, including planning, designing, building, operating and
transfer (PDBOT) phases
-
Create telecom business and operational map outlining key value
chain activities and their functional interfaces to serve as a tool for
communication and collaboration across various functional departments
-
Create an easy to understand technology map providing
360 degree view of the new national network to be shared across all
technical departments and their management layers to improve their
communication and problem-solving processes
-
Create end-to-end network troubleshooting scripts and support
processes to be used by each support tier to diagnose network elements
belonging to different departments, including Radio, BSS, GSM, GGSN, HLR,
VAS, MMS, Unix, NMS, Billing and other subsystems
-
Create end-to-end data flow diagrams across various elements to help
in the FCAPS (Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and
Security) management
-
Leverage telecom management frameworks and international IT best
practices, such as (ISO FCAPS, TMF FAB, ITIL, COBIT, etc.) to streamline
operational processes and services
-
Fine tune the implementation and integration of
various network management tools to utilize the full functionality of
each software subsystem and to save the engineers time, effort in
managing the network
-
Update the customer service, help desk and trouble ticketing systems
with better technical and operational content at all support levels to reduce
problem escalation and speed problem-resolution time
-
Use a collaborative enterprise knowledge management system to
leverage the collective intelligence of various technical teams to help
improve knowledge acquisition, dissemination and communication; and to
speedup planning, implementation and problem resolution processes
The Results:
The results of the engagement were immediately felt and
the initial consulting engagement grew from a 2-week consulting project to 11
capacity building projects over 4 years. The management and technical training programs,
presentations and documentation were delivered at the VP, Directors,
Managers, Supervisors and Technical levels, essentially building AT&T
Wireless Telecom University and Technical Knowledgebase.
The direct benefits of the program were improved
staff expertise, enhanced communication and collaboration between various operational teams,
smoother transition to the new generation network,
enhanced network availability and improved customer service level management (SLM).
The client now uses the training program and manuals as their operational
and technical training standards. Existing and new employees leverage the
developed knowledgebase to help them deliver on their
everyday challenges.
The senior management achieved their objectives of
improving their operational speed and excellence as part of their
competitive strategy
Client Testimonials for Various Projects:
I just want
to take a moment to express how pleased we are with the work of <the
consultant>. The feedback from my team has been extremely positive. It is
obvious that he has a real gift for communicating his vast knowledge in
comprehensible terms. In relatively short time, the consultant learned the
complexity of our operations and translated this learning into meaningful
lessons for our people. This has come at a critical time for us as we
quickly move into the next generation network capabilities. -
Richard Okino - Director, National Wireless Network Control Center (WNCC)
The consultant researched, developed and presented customized training
presentations and documents for the AT&T Wireless Network Operations Center
team as well as the support teams for the NOC. The presentations and
documents are still being used as the basis for today's training and
documentation many years later as they represent the most comprehensive
documents we have available to us. The results of the training were
immediately seen in the NOC following each training session. The technicians
trained during this period have gone on to extremely successful careers
within the AT&T Mobility networking group as well as many other
Telecommunications companies. I would highly recommend the services for
thoroughness, dedication to duty and excellent presentation skills. -
Marnie Haworth, Training Project Manager
I found the consultant's insight and knowledge of the wireless industry to be
a benefactor into driving success across multiple National Operations Teams,
specifically between the WNCC and MMS Operations. He is a true expert within
the wireless arena, focusing on inter-dependencies, SLAs, availability, and
performance of a national network. He is well respected, easy to work with,
and extremely personable. He keeps up to date on the latest technologies and
best practices. I strongly recommend him to work for any organization.”
- Mark Hart - National NOC Manager
The training was very useful for my next job. The course
customization was excellent. The course advisor has deep knowledge
and insights into senior management thinking and their "triggers".
The most useful experience that I gained from attending this course
is how to think and act like a CIO. If you want to advance your
career, you should take this class. - Brian Chan - IT Security
Manager
The consultant is a person who can build bridges and is extremely good at
crossing organizational boundaries to unify departments within an
organization.” - Paul Farag,
Lead Network Operations Support Engineer
I worked with IIM consultants for 3 years on a few different projects.
They always delivered results and exceeded expectations. With a “can do”
attitude and willingness to go the extra mile they have been key players in
many successful projects at AT&T Wireless - Sam Mikhail Senior Telecom
Engineer
The consultant is very professional and knowledgeable in the Network
Security industry. He was instrumental in assisting my team to maintain a
high quality experience and secure operating environment for our customer's
devices. It was a pleasure working with him. - Doug Truex - Network Security
Analyst
The <consultant> is a very intelligent who produces large amounts of high
quality work. People like and respect him and I would welcome the
opportunity to work with him again. - Suzan Miller, Tools & Support Sr.
Manager
We originally hired IIM advisor for a consultation of how to improve the
efficiencies of our Network Operations and their interactions with their
escalation groups. My team was one of those escalation groups. The
consultant helped identify several key areas to focus on, one of which was
training. We were impressed with the knowledge of networking so we hired
them back to perform some of this training for the NOC and to get them
up-to-speed. They were very professional and we got nothing but praise on
the work done.” - Shelly Johnson - Lead Principal Network Architect
Sample Telecom Training Material:
- Telecom Training Course 1:
Telecom
Architecture for Managers
- Understanding wireless Telecom architecture. Radio network. Voice
network. Data network. Multimedia Network. IT billing, provisioning and
reporting.
- Telecom Training Course 2:
Next
Generation Wireless Telecom
- Wireless technology roadmap (CDPD/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS). Transport
technology roadmap (TDM/SONET/DWDM). IP Technology roadmap (Data,
Voice & Video over IP: VoIP/SS7oIP /QoS /MPLS). IT Applications
technology roadmap: (SMS/Multimedia/M-Commerce). What does this mean
for telecom companies? Services strategy and operations
- Telecom Training Course 3:
E-Telco Management - Operation Support System (OSS)
- Network management Roadmap. Elements of telecom operations
support systems (OSS). End to End (E2E) integration of network
management systems. Case Study: Netcool Manager of Managers Tool.
Telecom management best practices and next generation OSS
- Telecom Training Course 4:
Telecom Management Best Practices
- Wireless service provider (WSP) challenges. Defining best practices.
Network management maturity. Strategic action list. Performance
management. Network operation management (NOM) best
practices. Telecom managers key questions. Quick wins.
For your custom corporate training needs, please
contact us
More Management Support and Training
..
Strategic Management Retreats and Consulting
Management Training Opportunities, please visit
|
