In the latest article in our series on how to successfully execute your network transformation, we are going to turn our focus on the key pitfalls you are likely to encounter, and the strategies you can take to avoid them altogether, or at least to mitigate their impact.

As we’ve said in the previous articles in this series, Click here if you haven’t transformed your network in the last 24 months, you will almost certainly have to in the next 24 months.

So, what are the main pitfalls you are going to encounter, and what can you do to stop them derailing your network transformation?

Pitfall 1 – If you don’t baseline properly, you’ll come unstuck

Baselining current costs, services, contracts, and performance can often seem like one of the most boring activities in the whole process of network transformation, and it can often feel like a step you can cut out. Indeed, more than 50% of the organisations we surveyed did exactly that. However, the sad truth is that most of those organisations ultimately wished they hadn’t skipped baselining – but why?

The simple fact is that if you don’t know where you are starting from, it becomes almost impossible to prove the benefits your proposed transformation will deliver, and therefore almost impossible to build a consensus across the organisation for the investment of time, effort, and money to progress.

However, the good news is that, in TNC’s experience, building a comprehensive baseline needed be hugely painful, and can often deliver “quick wins” that help to build goodwill and support for the wider network transformation process.

Here’s our key tips to successfully build your baseline:

• A lot of the heavy lifting of building your baseline can be done by your suppliers – challenge them to give you copies of contracts, inventories of services, recent billing etc. – they should have this data to hand, and the fact that you are considering the future of their services should mean they are incentivised to help out. Of course, if they are either unwilling or unable to provide you with the data you request, that should tell you a lot about their suitability to be your supplier in the future
• No baseline will ever be 100% perfect, so focus on gathering the best baseline you can in 6-8 weeks – that will help keep momentum in your transformation process
• Don’t forget to baseline network performance as well as costs and contracts – knowing key metrics about your network will be key later in the process to assessing the benefits new technologies could deliver, and particularly to evaluate the costs of achieving these benefits

Pitfall 2 – Plan for Delays

The reality of network transformation is that it will always take longer than you expect, so it’s vital that you plan appropriately for this.

Let’s consider why this is the case. Firstly, network transformation typically involves building a coalition across lots of different stakeholders, all of whom have competing priorities and have to fit network transformation into their already-busy diaries. Secondly, network transformation is complicated – it always involves technology change, carries lots of dependencies across lots of technologies, crosses over lots of other projects etc.

And that’s only considering the timing risks within your organisation – there are similar risks in all the external parties, whether delays in delivering bids from service providers, to delays waiting for new technologies from vendors, and a thousand other things that can and will occur during the process.

As a result, it’s vital that you build a plan that can be sufficiently flexible to absorb these delays. Indeed, the biggest single thing you can do to de-risk your transformation process is to start it as early as possible – this helps to build as much contingency into the timetable as possible – you’ll be glad you did!

Pitfall 3 – Not Everything Will Work

One of the most impactful issues that has arisen with network transformation over recent years is the frequency with which solutions procured fail at pilot and/or during deployment. TNC’s research shows that there are two main reasons for these failures, but both ultimately boil down to the approaches taken by service providers:

1. Service providers don’t have sufficient depth of knowledge of more cutting-edge solutions, and therefore don’t specify solutions correctly, often meaning that solutions need to either be upgraded to achieve the target results, or even need to be completely re-designed
2. Service providers tend to be too optimistic about the specification of the solutions they are proposing, to win deals and to help make business cases work, which compounds the issue set out above

Of course, these issues will have both time and commercial impacts, where delays are caused by the need to re-design solutions, potential rip out and replace sites already deployed etc., whilst almost certainly the re-design will cost more money.

So, what can you do to mitigate these risks? In TNC’s experience, there are three main approaches you can and should take:

1. As mentioned in Pitfall 2 above, start your transformation as soon as you can so you hopefully have some time contingency to allow for any re-design work required
2. Make the service provider contractually and commercially responsible for the solution working. If they are selling you a service, it should be up to them to warrant that it works. If they won’t, they are telling you something very interesting – either that they don’t know enough about your environment to be sure the solution will work, and/or they don’t know enough about the solution. Either way, you are better finding that out before you sign a contract and when you still have the ability to take steps to address the issues
3. If possible, start small. There is always a temptation to shoot straight for a “big bang” transformation, but that creates significant risks. If you can start trialling solutions, rolling out to small numbers of sites, and getting to see your transformed solutions and suppliers working, that can significantly de-risk the remainder of your transformation

Pitfall 4 – Service Providers will over-promise and under-deliver

As noted above, as network technology continues to develop at a hugely rapid pace, service providers continue to struggle to ensure their people, processes, and products keep up to date with the latest innovations. Whether or not that is understandable, the risk it creates is that they over-promise on the capabilities of their services and their ability to deliver the outcomes you require, and then follow that up with under-delivery once the contract is signed.

In TNC’s experience, the mitigation to these risks are clear:

1. Be a challenging buyer – make the bidding service providers, particularly those looking like winning your process, properly validate their credentials. This can and should mean talking to reference customers (and not just the “happy path” ones usually wheeled out, but also some where issues have arisen), making sure you meet the team that will actually deliver your project, not just the salespeople etc.
2. Make your contract work for you – include clauses to deal with potential issues that could arise and allocate the risks in these issues clearly back to the service provider to resolve at their costs
3. Start small if you can and award your solution in tranches – that way, the service provider has to demonstrate their capabilities before they get the full contract award

Pitfall 5 – Build your contract to enable flexibility

It’s not just network technologies that are changing quickly – so are the demands organisations are placing on their networks. For these reasons, it is almost a certainty that the requirements you have at the start of your network transformation process will have changed by the time you’ve rolled out your new solution, and will change again in life.

It is therefore critical that you build contracts that facilitate change, and don’t penalise you for it.

The good news is that it is absolutely possible to do this, but as always, there are a few golden rules to follow:

1. Make the need for change, and the types of change you need, clear from the start of your conversations with service providers – if they know about it from the start, they can build it into their proposals, but if you spring it on them later in the process, they will very likely start to put up the price
2. Plan out the likely scenarios you may face, and build the contract around these. For example, if you are likely to close your Data Centres by year 3 of your 5 year contract, get the costs for this agreed when you negotiate the contract, and when your leverage is at its greatest – if you leave it until year 3, when your leverage is low, it will cost you much more
3. Include provisions for costs to fall as well as rise. For example, if you reduce your number of sites, your service management cost should fall, but most contracts don’t specify this, meaning service management costs can rise as a percentage of total costs over time

Summary

Transforming your network is a huge undertaking that can deliver huge benefits to your organisation, and outstanding results for your network. However, it is a significant undertaking that carries many risks and needs to be managed carefully to mitigate as many of these risks as possible.

The pitfalls set out above cover some of the biggest risks and following TNC’s advice will help you navigate these complex waters as effectively as possible.

However, we would always advise you to call us when you are considering transforming your network. TNC has over 20 years of experience helping some of the UK’s largest and most demanding organisations secure the best possible outcomes from their network transformation processes. Click here to talk to us.