The experience of more than 100 implementations of Hydra’s own billing allows us to draw another not very pleasant conclusion. Even when the company management is configured most constructively and is ready to invest in a new system and its implementation, far from always this motivates the technical specialists of this company, they often need a custom billing.
As a result, most customers can not manage the project implementation – before its launch, it seems to everyone that will need to actively control the contractor (ie us), but in many cases, on the contrary, we have to control the customer. It’s not because the customers are lazy or bad, but for objective reasons – the telecoms operator has no “extra” employees, they all are busy with current tasks, and the implementation of new billing they have to deal with almost overtime.
As a result, the projects are not always completed in time. When an implementation contract has just been signed, and there are still a few months before the launch of the system, the temptation to postpone the work in this direction, and do something more urgent now.
This results, for example, in the fact that we could wait for months until the customer’s engineers prepare a test bed for the “filling” of billing and its configuration. First we are not given a virtual machine for a week, then we can not connect to it because of no open ports, then the system is rebooted and again no access to the test bench – for such “important” task it can take up to a month.
As a result, when the deadline begins to be tight, the specialists of the client company, as a rule, begin to put pressure on the managers. It is often impossible to move the terms of the transition to a new billing, so after months of wasted time it is necessary to catch up with all the backlog.
Many times faced with similar situations, we came to the need to reformat the work on the implementation of billing. Now we fully assume the management of such projects – for this purpose, the company has a dedicated employee, who maintains all the information in the Teamwork project management system.
It clearly shows all the necessary stages of the project, the tasks that must be completed, and the areas of work that will be unlocked after that. The persons responsible for the tasks on both sides are also indicated.
Thus, we have the task to monitor all stages of the work, the correct logging of the work performed and planning of the upcoming tasks to be done by ourselves and put before the customer’s specialists.
As a result, the efficiency of the work of engineers from both sides increases significantly – the employees of the developer company understand better what and when they need to do on the project, and the client’s representatives know at what stage of the whole process. In this way, potential problems can be identified before they grow into something serious.