A Case Study : Vodafone Limited

How the implementation of Red Box helped Vodafone meet the challenge of controlling change

The growth of the mobile telephone market has been phenomenal over the past few years with service providers fighting fiercely for customers in what is an extremely competitive marketplace. To retain and augment their customer base these companies look to network providers such as Vodafone to deliver not only excellent national and international coverage but a flexibility of service that enables them to keep delivering new options to attract the customer base.

And a key element is a flexible approach to tariffs. Vodafone’s Commercial Services Department is responsible for the billing process, turning calls made either direct into bills for the service providers or transmitting the data to those providers enabling them to create their own customer bills.

Explains Ian Barrie, change and problem management coordinator at Vodafone Commercial Services: "Changes in service provision always impact the billing process."

Indeed, within the first five months of this year the company has undergone several major changes - not least the introduction of per second billing. Additionally, "We have allowed service providers to mix their billing systems: they can actually change the way they bill their customer just by telling the customer he is on a new tariff. In the past it was a far more complex procedure."

These changes, combined with the growth in digital communications and the introduction of new services such as Minute Manager which tells the customer how many free minutes he has left, all culminate in significant billing changes.

Barrie says: "As a result, while we were mostly internal before, we now deal with a lot of queries from outside our environment, especially from the service providers who are our main customers."

He adds: "One of the biggest challenges with an organisation this size is the complexity and rate of change - and the consequent problems that may arise. We are introducing major changes every month or two and it is imperative that we retain control of those changes within budget."

Barrie’s teams of help desk, problem management and change management personnel are focused on controlling and managing these issues. But with the increasing rate of change it became clear, early in 1995, that the existing Help Desk solution was unable to support developing business needs. Explains Barrie: "We could not control our problems properly - we had trouble seeing the wood for the trees."

Vodafone Commercial Services decided that a new Help Desk solution was essential. However, says Barrie, they needed more than just a help desk. "We wanted to purchase a totally integrated solution incorporating an asset register, change management and problem management as well as the core help desk software."

Having adopted the CCTA IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) as its standard methodology, it was important to procure a solution that would support that strategy. Additionally, "We were looking for a solution that could provide us with excellent management reporting."

After extensive product evaluations, Vodafone opted for Red Box from Ultracomp. "Red Box was chosen because it followed the ITIL methodology very closely," he says. And, critically, it tightly coordinates the change and problem management procedures. "Obviously every problem can create a change and often changes will create problems" Barrie confirms.

Vodafone decided to kick off with the replacement of the Help Desk element of the system, which went live in April 1995, followed swiftly by problem management. And, as a result, the focus of the teams has changed - while the emphasis is still on rapid turn around of calls to the help desk, it no longer stops there: staff are now focused on exploiting the available information to pin down the key underlying problems.

"We used to only solve 25 per cent of our calls at the help desk. We now solve 60 per cent," says Barrie. He attributes this dramatic improvement to a combination of enhanced underlying information that enable staff to track problems and an increased base of technical knowledge within the help desk personnel.

He adds: "Obviously, it is still important to turn calls around rapidly and staff need incentives." Vodafone is now extensively using the management reporting facilities within Red Box to compile league tables of team performance which, he says, really works. "The information we get from Red Box also enables the team manager to drilldown and pinpoint problems and then focus on their resolution."

He asserts that the teams are now achieving excellent call and incident management and good problem management - and that ratio of ten calls per problem at the help desk has been reduced dramatically. "We can see problems in black and white - there is clear visibility which enables us to inform the customer of exactly what the problem is and when it will be resolved."

Having cracked the help desk and problem management areas, Vodafone is now about to embark on the implementation of the change management element of Red Box. He explains: "It can take up to three weeks to authorise a change - even a minor one. My aim is to reduce that to less than a week."

Currently, different teams are working to different change management approaches. But, rather than have to undergo an extensive reeducation process, Barrie maintains that the versatility of Red Box enables each team to work differently if wished, provided the basic change control procedures are adopted as dictated by Vodafone working practice, the quality department and BABT. "Those specific points can be built in and then each team can use the product to suit their own working practices," he says,.

The key benefit is, again, visibility, "Our existing approach to change management works but it is hidden," he says. "Levels of notification, levels of awareness and rapidity of change are all very much reduced currently. The new change management system will enable changes to take place faster and with more visibility."

This visibility will also improve customer awareness of ongoing major changes. At the moment, it is difficult for everyone to be up to date on forthcoming changes and their current status. "With Red Box people can see where changes are in the pecking order, what is being worked on and assess their relative importance," Barrie maintains.

Once this is up and running, Vodafone Commercial Services will complete the solution with the creation of a configuration database which, he says, will enable them to have a much better indication of who the caller is and his business area based on the hardware, software and services he is using. "This will really underpin the help desk," he says. "We will be able to provide a faster, better service to the customer. In fact, I am looking at achieving an 80 per cent call resolution level at the help desk once this is introduced."

Customer service is obviously the critical factor in measuring the success of the team and Vodafone is now exploiting the information and statistics within Red Box to progress Service Level Agreements with customers. "This information provides us with a sound basis upon which to discuss our customers’ service issues," says Barrie.

Additionally, Vodafone plans to utilise the programming interfaces available within Red Box to bolt on a Service Level Agreement application, one of many potential areas of development that will exploit the open interfaces now available. "We have also been looking at graphical management information bolt on applications," he says. "We produce huge amounts of graphical information each month demonstrating system availability, service availability, turnaround of incidents and turnaround of problems for a range of different services. This is all critical information to share with our customers."

The introduction of change management will increase the usage of Red Box extensively - from 33 concurrent users to, he predicts, around 60. "Red Box is a strategic product for us now. To ensure visibility people have to have access to the system: project managers, team leaders and change managers." Plus the IT account management who is responsible for ensuring the service providers are happy. "He has to keep a close eye on what is happening to the service providers," says Barrie. "Once change management is available he will want to know exactly how changes will impact them."

In this fiercely competitive telecommunications market the only way to keep ahead is to constantly change and adapt the products and services on offer. Now, says Barrie, with the introduction of the Red Box solution, Vodafone Commercial Services is in a position to support that need for change rapidly and efficiently. And, critically, with the visibility of information the inevitable problems that arise can be quickly tracked and solved, ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction.

"Red Box enables us to manage the situation better," he concludes; "We can concentrate on a problem, find out its root cause, work out how to recover from that situation and then go into the change control and management system to get that resolved and closed off and hopefully never have that problem again. That is what we aim for: never have a repeat problem."

"In Your Team, On Your Side" E-mail: sales@ultracomp.co.uk