The Deadly Mistakes That Wholesale Subsea Cable Providers Make: Part 2

 4. The star-shaped organization model defines each department by function such as sales, provisioning, procurement, network operations and the like and has it directly report to the COO or CEO. Each department has a large degree of autonomy and independence which encourages kingdom building and departmental bickering. 

We improve cooperation by recognizing that accountability requires some departments be subordinate to others. For example, procurement falls into two categories: backbone and the customer driven requests where a third party component like a long haul circuit, metro dark fibre pair or a local loop is required. Third party sourcing for customer driven requests should in the sales department. I know salesmen at one European carrier that source their own off-net requirements because procurement takes to 2 to 6 weeks to do it. Once a verbal yes is received, the salesman then points procurement to the third party offer. If sales determined the compensation and performance reviews of off-net sourcing, I am highly confident that the buyers would turn these requests around in a few days, if not hours. 😄 This leads to another issue, namely compensation. For off-net sourcing the traditional model is to a pay a fixed monthly salary which does little to motivate. Instead the model should be lower pay with a big bonus for good performance as well as a clear career path. This is the Wall Street model. 

Another department that should fall under sales is provisioning. There is no sales credibility if circuits are not delivered in a timely fashion, namely two to four weeks. Amazon became a leading retailer largely based on its ability to quickly deliver a wide variety of well priced products in one to three days. This dramatically reduced shopping time for the time starved American household who would otherwise drive for 20 to 30 minutes to go to a mall. Lumen's poor circuit provisioning has persisted for decades. If provisioning with the exception of backbone upgrades reported to sales, this problem would vanish because their jobs would be at stake. 

5. Lack of clearly defined performance goals outside sales. In the beginning telecom was a monopoly. AT&T as a PTT had sales targets. It also had network performance standards such as the famous 99.99% completed phone calls target. Perhaps I have been outside the corporate world too long, but my impression is that there are no performance targets for provisioning, customer service or network deployment. Wholesale telecom needs standards and targets for most important functions. Moreover, there should be strong incentives skewed towards prudent innovation and experimentation because most organizations are the opposite. Every manager views the status quo as good. Trying new things has more downside than upside. Risk is asymmetric.. I believe this problem can be ameliorated to a degree. Not eliminated entirely, but softened.