Final Project Plan Paper
Introduction
In the Telecommunications industry, balancing assets and profitability is especially
important in the survival of a given company. This is due to the fact that consumers are
becoming more knowledgeable and understand the technical aspects much better now than
in the past. Customers are always looking for new technological solutions and more
bandwidth as their applications are becoming more sophisticated. Small
Telecommunications companies, in an attempt to keep up with the technological changes,
are moving too fast and often do not properly track their costs. In addition to the technical
challenges, new regulatory changes are making hard for CLECs (Competitive Local
Exchange Carriers) to compete against the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers).
These changes are ILEC friendly and are triggering higher imposed costs for the CLECs.
This paper will discuss how these changes impact a CLEC to the point where costs and
revenues are no longer tracked properly.
This paper will also discuss a project created to identify where changes can be made to
realign costs and revenues in order to improve margins as well as determine asset
usefulness, utilization, and values as part of the cost to do business. Part of the discussion
will revolve around project planning, forecasting, and risk assessment.
Project Plan Overview
Project description: Due to proprietary information, the specifics about this project and the
company it relates to will be modified. The aforementioned changes and impacting factors
have forced the CLECs to face an increase in costs and a slight decrease in revenue caused
by customer churn. ABC Telecom, the subject of this paper, has created a project that will
target a detailed review of each point of presence an each network element in order to
determine whether maintaining a network in certain markets is profitable. This project will
also examine the profitability of its edge network.
Problem Statement: A local network is comprised of many components: switch sites, POPs
(Points of Presence), Collocations, and transport sites. Collocations are where customer
facing assets are located. For a local company, more than 80% of all customer services go
through these collocations. Therefore, they can be considered the lifeline of any local
company because they connect to the customer through their established infrastructure to
homes and businesses. Services such as POTS (Plain Old Telephone Services) must go
through collocations. Therefore, a portion of the cost to do business is associated with
these collocations. Some of these services must be carried across the country and through
multiple network elements and sites to be terminated. Therefore, some of the cost has to be
distributed across the network. The purpose of this project is to determine how that cost
and, consequently, how the revenue can be allocated properly in order to determine
profitability. Once profitability studies are completed, then decisions to decommission or
maintain network presence in a given market must be made.
Mission justification and high-level scope: Mission, objectives, and strategies are set to
meet the needs of customer(s). Development of a mission, objectives, and organization
strategies depend on the external and internal environmental factors. (Gray & Larson,
2005) ABC Telecoms mission statements revolve around world-class services, competitive
rates, and state of the art technology. Obviously, the importance of reducing cost is
emphasized by the promise to provide products and services at a competitive price. This is
important as large companies consider bandwidth a commodity and emphasize the
underlying services. Smaller companies such as CLECs cannot afford to take that approach
but they still have to compete. In that regard, they must find other ways to cut costs and
reduce rates. This project will reduce the cost burden on the company and ensure a better
understanding of margin thresholds.
Strategy: The scope of this project is all encompassing and very involved; therefore, the
timeline of such project spans a minimum of nine months. The main objective of this
project is to determine whether the company is profitable in a given market with the
deployed assets, reduce cost, and increase the overall margin by at least 10%. This project
will be managed in two distinct phases:
Profitability analysis: This study process is simple but required the participation of all
departments. Network Planning, Engineering, Filed Operations, Sales, Finance and
marketing all have to be part of the study. Business practices and daily processes must be
reviewed and reevaluated. The profitability analysis study includes a review of the actual
costs of maintaining network presence in a given market, the current revenue, future
forecast, equipment decommissioning and displacement costs.
Decommission implementation (if necessary): This phase would require participation from
the implementation organizations in addition to Network Planning, Customer Service,
Engineering, and other implementation organizations.
Measurable success: The success of this project will be defined by three important
measurable aspects. All the deadlines and scheduled deliverables must be met. Any length
of time spent with the current cost and revenue structures in place mean lack of
profitability for that much longer. The project manager will track these deliverables and
the associated dates. As part of the project team, all members must be responsible enough
to ensure timely delivery of all project components. Communication between team
members is extremely important. The main metrics will be gross margin improvement,
implementation timing and costs, and customer experience. Each of these metrics can be
measured and tracked.
The importance of this project lies in its alignment with the strategic goals and objectives
of the company. Strategic alignment is directly related to the fundamental processes used
to manage the day-to-day corporate business objectives. This is important to consider