Customer Operations Excellence Limited

Local authority – London BoroughMore

PE House/Pay TV – Assessed R&D and other cost reduction opportunities within a High Tech solutions provider that developed key solutions for satellite Pay TV companies
European Cable TV Altnet – Synergy planning across sales, marketing and networks in preparation for final binding offer for other competing Altnet delivering Pay TV, MVNO and fixed telecoms services. 61
Clientwise - Delivery of a £2M custom development of opportunity management processes using an agile method and Business Process Management software
Alchemy, acquisition of Geo – Reviewed propositions of a Telco that was leveraging an extensive ‘second hand’ national dark fibre network acquired for next to nothing. Tested the uniqueness and differentiating characteristics.
Vodafone – Telecoms service launch. Enabled Mobile operator to plan how to become partner of ‘choice’ for service providers, by augmenting basic data services with a valuable service layer
ESAT – Prepared proposal for a joint venture, now executed, to use railway assets in Eire to establish a national network, working with key finance, technical and marketing managers
Reuters – Using competition and well defined requirements to reduce cost, providing sourcing advice across complex global telecoms services
Orange – Network review. Analysed service and network management requirements & processes across a mobile operator’s applications and networks, recommending improvements
Barclaycard – Reduced cost by designing and delivering a virtual call centre needed to support a 15% headcount reduction, leading a mixed consultant/ client delivery team, and managing issues with stakeholders
Interflora – Enabled transformation to cut costs and improve services, supporting and leading its management team through complex decisions on IT, process change and vendor selection
Energy Utility – Designed and delivered a solution to deal with extreme demand on a call centre, to avoid a repeat of a customer service debacle
Local authority – London Borough - Assessment of technical telecoms designs and recovery plans for a troubled project to deliver innovative telecoms into a major new building and its satellites
Property business – Assessment of the current state of a regional contact centre. Part of a larger housing association under regulatory and budgetary pressure.

Risk assurance
Technical assessment

Local authority

London Borough - Assessment of technical telecoms designs and recovery plans for a troubled project to deliver innovative telecoms into a major new building and its satellites

A major programme to modernize communications ICT, with a centrepiece deployment in a brand new building, had been in trouble. After what appeared to be a successful pilot, followed by initial deployment, our client’s front-line staff started noticing echo, dropped calls and high level of distortion on telephone calls. Additionally, the new functionality of the system appeared to be inadequate in meeting business needs, resulting in vocal disengagement of key stakeholders.

The technical team had identified what they thought were the root causes and addressed them, but senior management - once bitten, twice shy – wanted independent assurance that it was safe to proceed.

David led an expert team to review technical documents, interview management and determine what further actions were required to proceed safely The work assessed the

Alignment of technical design to leading practice, particularly on resilience, capacity and the approach to vendor/technology selection. We found that the team had chosen innovative technology, but at every stage had considered risks using appropriate data. For example although the core part of the technical solution has a low market share, appropriate references had been taken. The team had taken design risk on KPIs such as Mean Opinion Score, Jitter and Packet loss, which could have been transferred to vendors to manage.
Appropriateness of the design of pilots of the technology. We found that the population of the pilots was dominated by technical staff, which resulted in poorer understanding of change management/behavioural risks. Additionally the scale of the pilots was too small to flush out the capacity risks that later materialized
Problem diagnosis of the client and the prescribed actions. We found that on the whole, these were sound, making it unlikely there would be a recurrence of the issues experienced. The issues arose because design work used a number of reasonable assumptions about staff behaviour (based on precedent) that proved to be incorrect. Specifically, it was assumed staff would use wired Ethernet connections from laptops to use services. In practice, new slim-line laptops no longer had the convenient wired connectors, and staff relied on wireless networks, quickly exhausting capacity with an unforeseen demand. The remedy to this “hard-to-foresee” issue was to upgrade to the latest IEEE802.11 standards and intensify coverage. We concluded this diagnosis was sound

We presented our findings firstly to the CIO to obtain agreement to the recommendations and implementation timing. The report was formally presented to and accepted by the Management Board.

Improved risk controls over design, procurement specification, pilots and deployment
Improved change management to ensure better alignment to stakeholder needs
Improved design principles for pilots
Improved Service management preparations