Introduction
Since the onset of man’s industrial ambitions, one of the realities that have constantly prevailed is that of change which has led to old ways sometimes being dropped for current trends. As a finance professional working in the telecommunication sector, I have witnessed trends in the business that have forced my organization to come up with various strategies to address these monumental changes. This essay purports to discuss the current trends in the telecommunication sector and how my organization has adapted to this with strategies that effectively addressed the changes.
Main body
The most apparent change in the sector is the shift to a more consumer oriented stance by the key players in the industry. Traditionally, there are three key players in the sector who include end users, service providers and infrastructure providers. The customer oriented behaviour has resulted in a reshaping of the manner in which service providers operate and subsequently, infrastructure providers have been affected by the same. In particular, as the service providers have become more customer oriented, they have allocated more resources into the revenue cycle concentrating less on operation problems. Traditionally, the role of infrastructure provides was limited to the construction and the formation of network and no one expected the providers to indulge in any other activities. However, current trends result in infrastructure providers not only being expected to build smooth systems to facilitate the telecommunication but also expected to be more customer oriented by adding more services to their existing portfolios that were previously handled by the service providers.
This shift was especially apparent to be in my capacity as a member of the managerial team in the finance department in Motorola Turkey (infrastructure provider), and as a member of a project team responsible for delivering the first Managed Services Contract in the world under GSM sector, Vodafone Turnkey 2 G Project (with a contract value 1.5 Billion $). To deal with these new trends, my organization had to come up with strategies to ensure the efficient delivery of the requirements of the contract. The first major strategic change was in our roles in the industry where we began considering the services providers (who are our customer) as our new partners without compromising the service mentality. Also, we assumed that the end users were our new customers
Another strategy involved the formation of small cross functional teams that were very given flexible decision making abilities. All of the tasks were to be handled by these project units which were connected to each other in a very organic way. As such, we maximized on all the communication means with our customer. Instead of fixed scheduled meetings, we made ad hoc meetings an intrinsic part of our teams. To ensure our success in the managed services, we also came up with a new base of targets aside from our regular customers who included; our service provider, our partner and their customer and various end users.
Conclusion
In addition to this, my organization ensured that compliance to external and internal rules and regulations was at the heart of our decisions, therefore dramatically decreasing rework. My organization capitalized on its multinational strength in every way possible relocating the best professionals to the areas they were most needed. We also endorsed the six sigma way of operating and as such, we allocated resources to only value added tasks and tried to eliminate variation and defects. These strategies enabled us to effectively cope with the current trends.