Battling the future

All of us know that it is an uphill battle achieving TM’s business objectives this time around. Nonetheless, our colleagues in Marketing and Sales have to continue to sell existing and incoming capacity, bill customers timely and notify customers for payment. We in Network Operations have to continue to support Regional Network Operations in the service installations and restorations, relief and rehab schemes to create capacity, cleaning database like CPAS and ensure that service breakdowns are attended to in timely manner while consistently maintaining our focus to achieve all MCMC targets. All these activities will put extreme pressure on our resources. Who would have thought that after all these years, we are still facing the same crisis?

The only difference is that this time around it is more acute, requiring for us to put our thoughts, skills and effort together. It would be nice if we succeed all the MCMC physical targets this year. But for me, the true reward is not in achieving those targets although they matter the most in term of avoiding the contractual penalties and maintain TM’s integrity at the top. What is more important is that nobody will be more skillful in removing bottlenecks as we plough through IPLC and Broadband crisis, and richer in terms of the experience of undergoing the process of “managing chaos” before us. Think about it.

I have always been the proponent that in time when tremendous demand is placed upon us, we have to be radical in our thinking and innovative in our approach to work. In fact it is our earnest desire to see TM pervasive in its culture for radical ideas, innovative in implementing those ideas, and relentlessly pursuing a culture that is continuously seeking a synthesis, a balance between the old guards and the young turks, a synergy between the old wisdom and the new, and the harmonious “chaos” in solving the daily problems. We are truly blessed indeed that all these demands have somehow created the very culture I mentioned. Today we are tougher than before and I do not think it is an overstatement that Network Operations today is more customer-focused, more responsive to the needs of the staff, and a lot more aggressive in its key initiatives than before. In fact we are about to witness the emerging of new ethos, and a positive culture that potentially will push us for higher efficiency.

Today, technology is becoming more the determinant that will steer most companies to success. A so we buy the digital switches, computers, routers, SDH, NGN etc. To me these technologies will be useless up and until the prevailing culture in Operations is pervasive enough to accept and operate at an intersection that will generate revenue and profitability for TM. You may ask, “…an intersection of what?”

In the industry that we are in, it is the “intersection” between infra, equipment & devices, and the human factor. Let us take the public payphone service as an example. For us to provide the service, there should be an infra which include cable plants and switches, there should be a device(…the payphone equipment itself) properly fitted to the booth, and there should be a dedicated team of technicians to ensure proper maintenance and cleaning of the payphone done to provide good hygiene and service availability. We should immediately notice that revenue generation will be impaired once any one of the three is missing. Since revenue and other opportunities are lying at this intersection, it would be natural then that the better and more effective we manage the intersection, the more money we will make. The challenge for all of us therefore is to facilitate the flow of radical ideas, either from the staff or through team brainstorming session, ideas radical enough to capitalize the intersection. The next challenge would be in harnessing the immense creative energy of the staff in transforming/implementing those ideas into revenue potential (…sometimes it can be cost-saving, quality improvement or image building). The third and the biggest challenge of all is to strike a balance of the resources we have around us.(…people, materials or otherwise) so that there will be a synthesis of effort towards achieving common objectives.

Can you identify a few of these intersectional opportunities? If you can’t, try doing it in group of five to eight. I guarantee you will have plenty. There’s nothing magical about it, its just the synergy of working in a team. After all would there be a better world in the absence of interdependency?

So with a tight year-end and a BP06 that further emphasize cost saving, the only fallback for us is to heed the advice of Dr. Covey’s “..do first thing first”. Let us prioritize everything from expansion to operations to maintenance and more so our lives. So that the little that we have can be be maximized in its entirety.