Telecoms providers have been given advice on
the disciplines needed to deliver IT projects to enterprises
successfully, through a study by
Bristol Business School.
Telecoms companies are increasingly bidding for IT contracts in
areas such as
unified communications, where the overlap between telecoms and
IT is strong, said a report by
Merlin Stone, professor of marketing at Bristol Business
School.
The study identified common reasons why projects in the telecoms
industry can fail, and showed the cost of failures to businesses by
carrying out benchmarking assessments.
The research estimated that 20% of major telecoms projects over
the past 10 years had failed mainly because telcos oversold what
they could deliver.
Suppliers also failed to meet an average of 50% of the agreed
project targets, the study suggested. Some enterprise users told
researchers that they were left with half-finished systems or no
system at all.
“The distinction between what constitutes an IT project and what
makes it a telecoms project is disappearing. In the 1980s, the type
of contract that a major telecoms provider would bid for would be
markedly different to the type of project that a company like IBM
would bid for, but now they are not that different,” Stone
said.
He categorised five behaviours of telcos when working on
projects that could cause failure. The most common cause of failure
was a culture of “promise now, deliver never”, which Stone claimed
was endemic across the telecoms industry.
A sixth behaviour, dubbed “the problem solver”, was identified
as a state typified by diligence on the part of the telecoms
supplier – and something that Stone said all telcos should aspire
to.
Mike Barnard, director of strategy and transformation at telco
Cable & Wireless, which worked with Bristol Business School
on the study, said, “We are absolutely focused on becoming ‘the
problem solver’, as customers are fed up with telecoms suppliers
who sell what they have, rather than what customers need.”
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