Insights
Few programmes overrun as reliably as telecoms BSS and OSS transformations. Replacing the billing, charging, order management and provisioning stack touches every customer, cannot easily be reversed, and carries revenue risk from the moment it goes live. The reasons these programmes overrun are consistent, and so is the place the risk concentrates: data and cutover. Understanding both is how you de risk them.
By Christopher Fagan
BSS and OSS stacks accumulate integrations, customisations and workarounds over many years. The true complexity is rarely visible at the outset, and it emerges during the programme, expanding scope and timeline as it does.
Migrating billing and customer data is unforgiving, because errors show up immediately as wrong bills and disputed charges, in public. The data is voluminous, the rules are intricate, and the tolerance for error is near zero. This is the single largest source of overrun.
Unlike some back office systems, a BSS or OSS cutover affects live service and revenue the moment it happens. There is limited room for a gentle transition, which raises the stakes on getting the cutover exactly right and on having a genuine fallback.
End to end testing spans multiple systems and often multiple parties, which is harder to coordinate and slips more than internal testing. Programmes that plan for internal testing timelines and meet cross boundary reality overrun.
Our consultants have worked on telecoms transformation, including with Vodafone. See BSS and OSS transformation or get in touch.
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