Technistic News & Research

Last week a colleague asked about software quality metrics for Operational Support System (OSS) projects. A large telecommunications provider was complaining that the system that they had delivered contained too many bugs. The question that she needed answered was "How many bugs is too many?" . In answer to this question she wanted some benchmarks for industry best practice in terms of bugs per lines of code (LOC). Before examining this question, we thought we should look at some of the characteristics of OSS projects, including: Typically they are large in terms of code base and time to deliver; They are complex ; They are highly customised ; They are expensive and; They deliver strategic benefits to the service provider. In situations such as these we start by looking at the customer's real concerns - there is usually an underlying problem that elicits the response "Your system contains too many bugs" . Here is a quick checklist:

This week we are taking a minor diversion and looking at the trend towards "opt-in" . Customers are no longer happy to accept a generic product that satisfies only 80% of their needs. At the same time they don't want to pay for 20% of a product's features that they have no use for. This is pushing service providers towards an opt-in model where customers can pick and choose which features they are willing to pay for and those that they won't. These needs are likely to change over a customer's lifetime, so provide customers with the flexibility of adding or removing features as required. The implications for service providers are: Break-down products into small feature sets that can be easily understood by the customer; Simplify your billing rules so that when combining multiple feature sets, the total cost to the customer can be easily calculated and; Provide customers with the ability to activate new products as they require them and provide them with self-s

Following on from our previous post on Service Modelling , we thought we would discuss the service catalog. Wait, is that a service catalog or a product catalog? If you remember, a product is something we sell to a customer. Most businesses would be familiar with a product catalog. At a restaurant the product catalog is called a menu. For some reason, telecommunications service providers struggle with the concept of the product catalog and this is usually because they confuse the definitions of products and services. The product catalog should contain all the items you advertise and sell to your customers. There are usually many more products than service types, as each product has a unique set of pricing information. If you sign customers up for fixed term contracts for example, each contract length defines a different product, even though the type of service provided to the customer is the same. The service catalog on the other hand is what drives the operational side of the

After a long hiatus of just on 12 months we're back. We will be continuing our series of weekly posts on service management for service providers. Stay tuned.

What does service modelling entail? Is it simply recording meta-data about a service such as how it is delivered, configured and monitored or is it something more? Recent discussions with a client highlighted how confusion over terminology about products and services can lead to product development chaos. We resolved the problem by coming up with an agreed set of terms that could be used consistently throughout the organization. The problem stemmed from the different perspectives held by billing and network engineering. Billing thought in terms of products. Network Engineering thought in terms of services. These are the definitions we developed and they may help your organization navigate the product development maze. Product This is what is sold to the customer. When a customer purchases a particular product they are provided with a standard set of services and equipment. Products have specific billing rules associated with them. For example: A product could provide a customer w

The challenge facing TSPs is one of complexity. The systems required to manage telecommunications services are inherently complex and often beyond the scope of the traditional I.T. department to deal with. They require people with a detailed domain knowledge of telecommunications services and I.T. architectures and systems that can support these. An OSS must be able to manage a service delivery process 100 times more complex than the supply chain management (SCM) processes employed by traditional retail and logistics organisations, monitor service performance and availability in real-time, provide information to Customer Relationship (CRM) systems, and collect information that drives financial systems after passing through complicated billing processes. This complexity can be multiplied each time a new network technology is deployed or a new type of service offered. By employing a service management layer to abstracts the complexity of the underlying nework, TSPs can provide an integra