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Telco Insights with Ralph Hengstenberg
Are you agile enough to launch new products and services quickly?
Customer preferences, market conditions and new technologies mean ever-shorter product life-cycles in the telecoms sector. To remain competitive, you must deliver new products and services and a better customer experience faster than ever before. Traditional development processes are simply too slow. You need an innovative approach if you are to keep pace with fast-moving over-the-top players such as Google.
While investing in service delivery platforms and moving to service-oriented architectures can help transform your IT systems landscape, it does not fully answer the speed-to-market challenge. During a traditional 12-month-plus development cycle, the market may move on. You may then need to implement costly changes to make your new product a success. So how do you change your ways of working - the processes, procedures and people aspects - to accelerate your speed to market, reduce your cost base through more effective reuse, and provide an improved customer experience?
One solution from BT is agile development. This technique uses faster ways of working, in a more collaborative environment. Technical and business functions collaborate through short "sprint-like" repetitive interactions. The business improvements that you can realise by using agile development include reduced product development cycle times, lower IT and systems costs and more productive collaboration between business and technical departments.
Agile development originated in the software development industry. Fuelled by ambition to move in the direction of a software-driven services company, BT successfully customised agile development for telecoms products and services. We have included it in our new operating model and concept-to-market customer experience journey.
The key to agile development is to find problems early. In BT's agile product development process, all major stakeholders from the various business and technical functions collaborate in hothouses and roundtables. We involve customers and suppliers in the product development process much earlier than before. Development takes place in a shared client and design and development environment.
Throughout the development process, we use the requirements that we know, and respond rapidly to new or changing requirements during the product development timescale. Repeated steps build on each other, and frequent step planning ensures a focus on key business priorities. We make the most of reusable components, when possible. We launch the product or service when it meets our customer's minimum requirements.
For BT, the use of agile development has been key in enabling us to reap the benefits of our service-oriented architecture.
As strong advocates of agile development, we also advise external clients on how to improve speed to market and cycle time. If you are interested and would like to find out more, please contact me or your local BT GTM account manager.
Talk again soon.
Ralph
Ralph Hengstenberg
BT Telconsult regional director Europe
Biography
Ralph Hengstenberg heads up the European Region for BT Telconsult to develop and manage consultancy projects with communication service providers, leveraging BT's experience and expertise in business transformation, next generation technologies and new wave services. In recent years, Ralph has worked as principal consultant in BT Telconsult, leading its Practice Knowledge Office and consultancy projects for clients globally covering portfolio, marketing, information and communications technology (ICT), IPTV and related topics.
Prior to joining BT Telconsult, Ralph was responsible for BT Global Telecom Market's portfolio of 21C Operator Services, now called Network & Business Transformation Services, to support the transformation of other telecom operators to become 21C communication providers.
Over the past ten years Ralph has gained extensive experience in ICT, holding various sales, strategy, marketing and business development positions in BT's global business units. As one of the founding members of BT's European solutions business, he addressed the needs of multi-national corporations with managed services and outsourcing solutions.
Ralph holds a BSc (hons) in Business Studies from the University of Wales, Swansea (UK) and a MSc in International Business from the European Academic Consortium and the University of Groningen (NL).
You may also read Ralph's interview "Meet Ralph Hengstenberg, director of BT Telconsult Europe" in the previous issue of Global Telecom News.
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