Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre
I too have 25 years experience working in the technology sector for a communications company and have built and delivered networks from the days of dial up internet to 1G FTTH, and worked on hundreds of projects to deliver products over these networks.
So I know the pace of which technology and innovative products are designed built and delivered, and i don’t recall anyone in a meeting saying it’s too difficult so we shouldn’t do it, or can’t do it. It was always we can’t do it that way, but we could do it this way.
---------- Post added at 09:41 ---------- Previous post was at 09:38 ----------
It would be a combination of both, enhanced technological solution, combined with a different regime of what is checked where, when and how.
My entire point in these last several posts has only been that if required a solution would and could be found.
---------- Post added at 09:51 ---------- Previous post was at 09:41 ----------
Sounds like you’re the man for the job then.
And from what you and others are quoting, 3 years / 4 years seems reasonable, not 10 years.
In my sector if we worked on 10 year cycles for rolling out new technology products we’d be out of business.
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But it’s not "rolling out", it’s developing from scratch a complex multi-national new business model, and the supporting processes, and interfaces. I have run Technology departments, including networks, and I always said they were the easiest to run - give me enough money to throw at a network/server farm/infrastructure build, and it can be done. It’s the stuff that runs on the networks and servers that is the hard part, and the discovery, design, development, and implementation of the processes and systems that is hard. When we did the data warehouse, it took a year to discover all the in-house systems that would need to be included (or excluded) - we found 635 different systems (because the company had grown acquired other mobile Telecomms companies), but when we started the discovery process, we were told there were about 200 - we then had to agree common output formats (as most of the systems had different size definitions for customer, address, billing fields, and thousands of other required parameters). We then had to find and ETL (extraction, translate, and load) software that could process 30,000,000 records an hour, and there were numerous set backs along the way, but we delivered, but also delivered value to the business.
That took three years with one company - we are talking about 28 UK Government departments, multiple countries, and potentially hundreds of thousands of businesses; it can be done, but I imagine 10 years is a reasonable timescale.
In your 25 years, have you been actively involved in the Programme Management (putting together Programme Plans, developing Risk Management and Management, senior Stakeholder management), or been actively involved in the technology development of the network equipment with the suppliers, or did you deploy it? I know for a fact Cisco, VMware, Microsoft, IBM, and the other major players gave a 10 year development cycle road-map (which is continually reviewed and changed).
And before you bring up "the pace of technology", any programme manager who proposed the solution to include "we don’t know what it will be, but we hope something unknown will be developed soon that will enable us to deliver" would be fired, or at least beaten about the head by Risk Management and Programme Governance.