This posting on Slashdot led me to this article on CIO.com about all of the trouble that happened at AT&T Wireless leading up to their poor experience in the early weeks and months of number portability. It really seems to me to represent an example of a perfect storm of poor executive decision-making.
Amongst the problems at AT&T Wireless that I gathered from the article are:
- The very poor choice of having meetings regarding the potential for outsourcing and off-shoring in very clear sight of employees who were likely to have their positions eliminated in the process. This seems to have been followed-up by shadowing of those same AT&T Wireless employees by employees from the firm to which the jobs would be outsourced.
- Some project management choices that sound very unusual to me. While not bein an IT project manager, the decision to have concurrent workstreams all making changes to code at the same time, such that each group was effectively coding against a moving target seems like a very unusual choice.
- The failure to take into consideration the challenges of the impending wireless number portability and the complications it would create for a new CRM implementation. The sheer volume of customer support calls one could expect at such a point in time should have provided a clarion call that it was probably not the best time to engage in a major IT excercise.
- Choosing a different firm from all of the other major wireless carriers to manage the number portability. According to the CIO article AT&T Wireless had already signed the contract with NeuStar, but considering the enormity of number portability and the fact that EVERY OTHER major carrier chose a different provider seems to be a senseless choice.
- It would be easy to be critical of the back office systems that support AT&T Wireless provisioning and billing, but the current management could hardly be blamed for that. These isssues are actually pretty typical of any telecom operation, and are actually the bane of pretty much the entire industry. They certainly don’t make life easy.
The real shame in all of this, I think, is that one set of very poor choices led to some serious problems with what I thought was a great company. I’m still an AT&T Wireless customer, but I’ve had my own problems with them recently. It’s been clear that they’ve offshored their call centre services without adequate training. It’s no wonder the company has been snatched up by Cingular, and I actually suspect that might be the best thing for their customers at this point. Hopefully a new set of executives will be making the IT decisions in the merged company. Hopefully the integration efforts once the merger is closed go better than the CRM implementation. The sooner this merger happens the better for AT&T Wireless so they can stem the churn. Luckily for the happy couple the competition have been making plenty of noise about how delays in the merger are going to be good for their business, helping to make the case for a speedy approval process for the merger.
