Client Espouses Benefits of a Partnership with TMNG Global
When a Tier 1 carrier assessed the challenges posed by its opportunity to provide wholesale local exchange termination services to a leading cable MSO it quickly concluded it could benefit from outside assistance, assuming a reliable source of such assistance could be found.
After reviewing the results of previous engagements with TMNG Global the carrier’s management concluded TMNG was the right choice for helping them manage the project. Three years later with all project goals accomplished, it’s clear the decision was a smart one, says the carrier executive who was the lead manager on the project.
“Under the terms of the contract we had to build out something like 1,445 rate centers at a rate of about 300 per month, and there were hefty penalties to be paid if we didn’t meet the requirements,” the executive says. “Historically we had done as many as about 40 per month. So it came down to we either had to add a significant number of people to meet the schedule, which would require that we have something for them to do when the job was done, or we had to seek outside help.”
Adding to the challenge was the fact that, once the carrier was properly set up in all the local rate centers, its existing voice customer base had to be migrated over to the new carrier from another provider, which had become a voice-over-IP service competitor in the MSO’s markets and therefore could no longer be relied on as a wholesale supplier. “We had to manage the migration of hundreds of thousands of customers within a very short timeframe,” the executive says.
The carrier had previously engaged TMNG’s services to help develop a plan for the initial integration and operations phase in a large merger between the carrier and another entity. “That kind of project, documenting and managing the first 100-day plan, is a pretty significant event,” the executive says. “It weighed pretty heavily in TMNG’s favor that, if they could be trusted to handle that project with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, they would have the expertise to manage the new project, even though the new one was much more technical in nature.”
Internal interviews with carrier personnel who had been directly involved with TMNG on a daily basis confirmed TMNG’s prowess, its commitment to quality and its commitment to meeting deadlines, he adds. This recent experience expedited the selection process, allowing the carrier to quickly bring TMNG professionals into the contract negotiation process with the MSO. “We were able to bring them into actual customer meetings where we were planning the buildout and migration, which allowed them to play an advisory role in those negotiations,” he says.
The carrier and TMNG agreed the execution of the contract would be overseen by TMNG experts through a Program Management Office (PMO). The PMO was tasked with assisting with planning for all phases of the project, developing systems and metrics essential to tracking execution and ensuring avoidance of penalties through coordination of all project activities and persistent monitoring and reporting on all details essential to performance. The carrier executive’s approach to integrating TMNG into the program execution process offers important insights into how a client can maximize the benefits of retaining outside assistance in a major project involving close interaction with client personnel at all levels.
“There were three areas I focused on in putting this together,” he says. “First, we spent a lot of time defining the purpose of the engagement – its role in our execution of the buildout and migration and in minimizing penalties. Second, was defining the process itself. We really had to know how we approach these tasks internally on an end-to-end basis in great detail. We had to map the process flows so TMNG and our organizations completely understood how to execute flawlessly on every aspect.”
The third aspect of this initial planning focus was the selection of people. “We handpicked the people from TMNG and our own people who would have responsibility for executing on this project,” the executive says. “By determining which people from our staff would be involved we identified the strengths and weaknesses that we brought to the project, which helped us define the skill sets we needed from the TMNG side.”
Another key factor relating to personnel that contributed greatly to the smooth interaction between TMNG’s PMO staff and the carrier’s people was the executive’s decision to avoid identifying the TMNG personnel as outside consultants. “Sometimes, in situations where companies reach out to consulting organizations to help manage projects, the internal staff can be pretty tightlipped when it comes to sharing information with the consultants,” the executive says. “I simply presented the TMNG project manager as our lead on the project and the other TMNG people as people I’d hired to be part of the project team. So we didn’t have any problems getting everybody integrated to work together on a day-to-day basis.”
Once the full scope of all the carrier’s existing processes relating to execution on project goals were fully mapped, the planning team worked out all the refinements that were essential to defining an end-to-end process map – known internally as a “Task of Arrow” (TOA) – to serve as the framework for meeting the contract requirements. “A lot of the TOA was about modeling the most efficient method for getting the rate centers turned up and making sure we knew where the critical points of potential failure were so that we would always be able to know where we were in the process and to manage issues as they arose,” he explains.
Once the team identified the monitoring and reporting requirements, additional people were brought in from TMNG to build the systems for drawing information out of key data bases to feed the daily, weekly and monthly reports that had to be distributed to all the involved players and senior managers, all the way up to the CEO. “They built the data base for tracking and they helped us execute on the reports,” the executive says. “This detailed monitoring of what was going on allowed us to define and assign action items to execute whatever fixes were needed to take corrective action. TMNG’s people not only provided us the data we needed; they helped us to solve whatever problems arose.”
The outcome of the rate center buildout segment of the project was everything the carrier had hoped for. “We met every target buildout date,” the executive says. “We paid zero in penalties.”
As daunting as the rate center buildout was, the ensuing customer migration aspects of the project were every bit as challenging, thanks largely to the lack of cooperation on the part of the legacy carrier. The MSO wanted the cutover to the new carrier to proceed as fast as possible, given the customer losses that were accruing as a result of the legacy carrier’s poor performance on fulfillment of its obligations to the MSOs’ customers.
TMNG helped with the negotiations that set the terms of the migration agreement, which included protection mechanisms to ensure the new carrier would not be penalized for the legacy carrier’s failures. While the migration rate the legacy carrier was willing to support was just a fraction of the rate the new carrier could support, the MSO and new carrier were satisfied that everything possible had been done to assure an acceptable agreement was reached with the legacy carrier. The challenge then was to keep things on track with the agreement terms across all participants.
“TMNG not only helped us with execution on the management and technical aspects of the migration process, they were on the ground floor helping us to negotiate the agreement,” the executive says. “There was a huge risk to us if the MSO lost customers because of anything we did or didn’t do. TMNG was instrumental in managing the scope and ensuring an acceptable level of risk tolerance for us.”
On the execution side, things went well under the guidance of the PMO team. “Once we worked out the terms and process definitions, the execution was pretty flawless,” he says.
With TMNG’s engagement now completed the carrier continues to record significant growth on the cable side of its wholesale business, the executive reports. “We’re likely to have big migrations come up in the future, so we’ve archived the systems and processes TMNG created for us,” he says. “The benefits of the relationship will have ongoing value.”
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