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 perfor...
