For the past decade, Ed Shanahan has been a Managing Principal of The Management Network Group. TMNG provides strategy, management, marketing, operational, and e-business consulting services to the global telecommunications industry. 

Before joining TMNG  — where he develops new accounts and coordinates service delivery to emerging carriers and OSS suppliers — Ed was a business systems and product manager at MCI, a senior manager of Exchange Carrier Billing at Sprint, and a Director of External Billing at Telesphere.

His client list at TMNG includes AT&T, Citizens Communication, MCI, XO Communications,  Maxis/Binariang in Malaysia, Telefonica in Spain and iPlan in Argentina.

In Winning The OSS Wars, Ed spells out the ABCs of the procurement process.  And he explains how carriers select vendors, shows you how to avoid the 10 most common project delivery mistakes, and reveals how to position your company to win more business.

This Is How You’ll Be Helped By This Road Warrior Briefing #2

Shortcuts. The more you have — and the better they are — the greater your chance of beating your competition to the prize. Whether you’re trying to assess your own OSS infrastructure and how to position it for the future. . .or whether you’re an OSS supplier or systems integrator. . . this Road Warrior Expert Briefing provides a shortcut that will remove a massive amount of inefficiency, dead-ends, blunders, and time-wasters from your path.

It will lead you more directly to your goals.

Here, identified and mapped with detailed precision, are the landmines in program management and project implementation you’d do well to avoid. . .

Here’s how vendors should position and conduct themselves to ensure longstanding, mutually rewarding relationships with the OSS professionals whose problems they’ve been hired to solve.

Here are the communication, vendor-selection, and scheduling problems that derail even the best OSS solutions. . .

Here are battle-tested insights into how vendors can best present themselves and their solutions to prospective carrier clients. . .

Here’s how smaller vendors can make themselves and their solutions heard over the louder voices of their bigger and more established competitors.

Table of Contents

• How a Consultant Assists Clients

• Assisting the Vendor Community

• Venture Capitalists Look at Telecom

• OSS Project Implementation

• Aggressive Timetables 

• Program Management

• Problems Aligning Strategy with Planning

• Enterprise-wide Business Processes

• Setting Realistic OSS Goals

• Isolating R&D from Decision Making

• Experienced Program Managers

• Honesty and Commitments

• Common Threads of Project Failure  
    1. Inadequate Planning
    2. Lack of Proactive User Involvement
    3. Lack of Experts
    4. Carrier Executive Changes
    5. Inadequate Control Management
    6. Poor Communication
    7. Lack Visibility into Work Processes
    8. Development Resource Diversions
    9. Expansion of Project Scope
   10. Overly Aggressive Schedules

• Relationship Between IT and Sales

• The CIO Takes Action

• The Vendor Selection Process

• Procurement is a Learning Process

• The Glossyware Problem

• Business Relationship Issues

• Head vs. Heart Evaluations

• Managing the RFP Process

• The Value Trapezoid

• Defining Business Processes

• Understanding the Carrier’s Business

• Interoperability

• Program & Project Management

• Fixed Price, Time & Function Contracts

• Gravity Pull on the Value Trapezoid

• Focus on the Differentiators

• Delivering a Stellar Presentation

• Marketing Rules of Thumb

• Getting Known in the Industry

• Working Industry Trade Shows

• Allying with Companies Upstream in the Selection Process