Point to Ponder

Time: 0200 hrs, Location: Somewhere in the Capital City

While some part of the city is long asleep, ((Beep)) ((Beep)) - The cellphone of an operations manager beeps. Within 5 minutes it beeps again. The manager checks the first message with blurred vision - “20 sites down- in Northern Areas, Initial reason - Power failure for 5 hours/ Genset out of fuel”

((Ring)) ((Ring))- This time its the NOC guy calling up. “Sir, another HUB site is out. The total outage site count is now 50″. The manager now wide awake listens to the engineer and confirms escalation of outage to field team. …..

The above lines are just a snapshot from the life of an operations team. They work and burn the mid-night oil like any other team providing round the clock services to the end users. It is the very nature of such jobs that make it complex, yet demanding and challenging at the same time.

I believe no other area of work within a telecom organization is more stressful than that of a Operations team responsible for 24×7 availability of the network. This is why that at the time of hiring fresh graduates at Network Operations Centers, they are clearly communicated the challenges and hectic life schedule of people working in shifts. They literally live and sleep on “Alarms“.

Yet more of a challenge is managing such a team of people- taking care of their career growth, motivation levels, workload and lots more. You loose track of one of these and the impact it has on the morale of these guys, its simply devastating for the network monitoring KPIs.

With increasing competition in the local market and falling revenues, the problems are compounded by economic downs.

For the equity holders, Networks need to be up and runnning, Costs controlled and threats to revenue growth minimized.

And in the words of the new US President Elect, these are changing times.