Assessment/Recommendations regarding a business-critical Network Resiliency Improvement plan led to a much stronger plan.

Challenge: A telecom provider had experienced a series of severe network outages over a short period of time. These outages spanned multiple services, technologies, and geographies, and significantly impacted the Service Provider’s customers and public image.

Action: Their Engineering team had recommended a significant increase in capital spending to address the problems, but the executive team engaged SkeensMcDonell to conduct an independent assessment into the root causes and contributing factors leading to the series of incidents and to make recommendations on how to improve their ability to deliver network reliability.

Findings: SkeensMcDonell found that, while additional capital investment was necessary and justified, there were underlying process and cultural issues that had led to the underinvestment and fragile nature of the network. These started with breakdowns in the investment planning process that did not promote a healthy dialog on investment risks and tradeoffs. In addition, the teams were too focused on technology and not enough on customer experience. Cutting across everything was an organization and culture that was centered around technology and functional silos, with no one owning any customer service end-to-end; this promoted a very fragmented approach to service design, delivery, and support.

Results: The telecom provider immediately established a series of cross-functional “workstreams” to focus on processes, training, and tools to address each of SkeensMcDonell’s recommendations. They also restructured their Operations organization to break down the old silos, and create a structure that focused on end-to-end service planning, design, implementation, and delivery.