Streamlining provisioning of mobile phone services
Sometimes existing and well established processes can be streamlined by simple solutions, tools and procedures. A simple knowledge base, simple tools for metrics and reporting, and some simple adjustments in regards how people behave and share information contributed substantially for a success story in the domain of provisioning of mobile phone services.
The client
A global information technology consultancy company, providing services to a mobile phone carrier in the USA.
Provisioning services to mobile phone customers in two hours
As a customer buys a brand new mobile phone or a SIM card, the customer expects to have all services available in a matter of two hours. The mobile phone carrier has 15 systems involved in the provisioning process where each of these systems has it’s own technology stack involved, its own process involved and, in particular, there may be interdependencies between these systems. When issues happen, they need to be addressed quickly in order to guarantee that customers get their mobile phones working properly as promises, in a time frame or two hours. During certain times of the year, notably Christmas and Mother’s Day, there’s exceptional high demand of services, which need to be handled with care and exceptional high skill, in order to guarantee that customers are satisfied in two hours.
Streamline production support, clear backlog
A backlog of nearly 400 tickets needs to be cleared. About 50% of the them are just old tickets which can be simply closed whilst the other 50% require far deeper analysis in order to understand what would be the path for solution. In any case, all 400 tickets require careful scrutiny before any action can be performed. Alongside of clearing the backlog, the entire process needs to be streamlined in order to avoid accumulating a big backlog once gain. Also, a far better understanding of the systems involved is needed, in order to prepare for exceptional demand as it is the case during Christmas and Mother’s Day.
Enabling a solution
Mathminds provided technical and mentoring services to a team of 5 engineers responsible for maintaining 15 systems in production.The central strategy was improving the documentation of actions performed by the production support team, in quick and free text form, so that the knowledge base could be easily shared among the entire team, promoting recipes which “just work” and contribute for solving issues quickly. A simple monitoring framework was implementing, providing visual feedback about the behaviour of the systems, and how interdependent systems contribute to each other or impact each other during high load. Thanks to gaining deep knowledge about how systems contribute or impact each other, dates of exceptional high demand could be handled without any troubles.
Conclusion
- Implementation of metrics and reports;
- Implementation of a workflow strongly supported by a knowledge base;
- Implementation of a culture of mutual shared success by individual contribution and meritocracy;
- End customers attended inside service level agreements;
- Improvement of all quality indicators;