Ready for transition to Networx?
By Dan Hannah

The year was 1999.  The government was transitioning from FTS2000 to FTS2001. Excitement was in the air.  Agencies were looking forward to saving money with aggressive new telecommunications contracts. Excitement quickly turned to horror, confusion, finger pointing, lost time and unhappy people.  Workers scrambled and spent many restless nights trying to manage their transition to FTS2001.

Are you ready this time?  What approach will you be taking?  Remember how the vendors were supposed to have a complete inventory of your circuits and services?  Are you going to let them manage your transition plan this time?  How about GSA?  Do you think they will be better than the vendor?  Really?

Let’s look back at the headlines from the FTS2001 Transition…

“Our experience has showed that we have not always received the fullest and most timely cooperation from other contractors especially those that stand to lose financially by the transition/migration. We have found that such contractors often use the arcane procedures and planning processes that have found their way into contracts to effectively disrupt what would be a standard process in the commercial world.”

“GAO describes the transition as sizeable and complex. Second, GAO recognizes that several parties share responsibility for transitioning to and implementing these contracts.”

“Nevertheless, we have been behind where we wanted to be with the overall transition. As of today, we are 95 percent complete with our efforts to transition more than 51,000 locations.”

“…Switched voice users, we have over 26 thousand locations nationwide.”

“…We have over 15 thousand locations using our Dedicated Transmission Service

…for switched data services, we have nine thousand locations.”

“…A significant amount of time and effort expended in the FTS2001 transition was not associated with transition at all. Instead several of our agency customers have been migrating from data services based on older technology under FTS2000 to state-of-the-art services offered under FTS2001. For many agencies, this has been highly complex and has required considerable planning, engineering, budgeting, and collaboration to accomplish.”

“What is unique to us is the scope and scale of Government transition.”

What were the most significant problems agencies encountered in transitioning to FTS2001?

There were five types of problems:

1. Problems associated with new characteristics of FTS2001

2. Planning problems

3. Problems associated with execution of transition

4. Problems associated with provisioning access

5. Problems associated with establishing billing codes

NEW CHARACTERISTICS OF FTS 2001

FTS2001 is quite different from FTS2000 in several important respects. In particular, customer agencies have greater freedom and flexibility to choose from an expanded menu of suppliers, products and services, and the opportunity to schedule activities so they occur at times that are convenient to them. Under FTS2001 agencies were challenged to select their supplier(s) giving fair consideration to both candidates. The initial transition plan called for the selection to take one month, but the process involved complex analysis, evaluation of several options, and development of consensus within agencies. In fact the process of selection took six months or longer for many agencies and required all parties to change their plans and schedules. In retrospect it should have been anticipated that a longer selection process was required.

PLANNING

Inventories of FTS2000 services were the starting point for FTS2001 transition planning. FTS2000 contractors maintained these inventories and agencies expected that they would be readily available when requested and accurate. This was not the case. Customers estimated that contractor maintained inventories were no better than 60 percent accurate. Considerable additional effort was required to determine sites served, and the types and amounts of services provided to furnish the baseline for planning.

Next came the decision of whether to transition like-for-like or to upgrade service to meet future needs…

EXECUTION

The most significant problem related to execution was difficulty getting information on schedules and status of local cutovers so agencies could be ready in advance…

ACCESS PRIVISIONING

Besides the coordination issues, the most significant physical impediment to transition execution was the provisioning of access. Second to that and the single most significant impediment from a procedural or support perspective would be billing issues. Let me address each of these a bit further.

Access provisioning connects the long distance provider's network to the customer's location. The delays in provision access came in several forms:

• First, there were the scheduling delays with the LECs…

• There were delays because of insufficient capacity to a location to satisfy the application needs… the agency was upgrading to a higher capacity service…

• Insufficient access needed to perform the actual cutover which is normally done in parallel. In this case, let us say that an agency was transitioning from AT&T to MCI WorldCom. AT&T's service was using the access lines, but MCI Worldcom's service also needed the access lines so that the customer's service would not be disrupted during the cutover acceptance testing period.

• Equipment provisioning at the customer site or somewhere between the customer site and the network. Various connection points may require new equipment to complete a connection or carry it to the network, and there were delays associated with waiting for the equipment to arrive and then to be installed and tested.

• Finally, another significant cause of delay was the manner in which certain data network transitions are accomplished. Frame relay data service, in particular, often requires hundreds of locations to be transitioned, but since they all feed central hub locations, the overall transition is not actually effected until the hubs are cutover. Thus, a significant transition effort is required over many weeks before any transition progress can be recorded since the data network is not operational until all locations are able to use it.

BILLING

This was not trivial, and did not always work as designed or expected. While equipment never changed, it took longer than expected for the billing systems requirements to be met. GSA authorized the contractors to use interim procedures to enable transition to proceed and to minimize delays. In addition, GSA facilitated the exchange of information on successful alternative billing solutions.

COST OF DELAYS

Bridge contract prices rose significantly.

Obviously, there is room for improvement. However, it is important to keep things in prospective. 50,000 + locations are going to be competing for the FTS2001 and the Networx vendors’ attention. It is safe to assume that most all telco vendors will be responding to the unprecedented transition from one contract vehicle to another. GSA has planned this transition with lots of involvement by industry.

What steps have you taken?  Are you prepared? Are you relying on GSA and the vendors to manage the transition for your organization?

Perhaps you should consider working with an independent company that has been in the telecom business since 1988 delivering robust software applications to carriers, end-users, and government. TeleBright provides ManageRight, our telecom management system for financial and technical aspects of voice, data, and wireless services infrastructure.  ManageRight is a web-based solution that offers industry-best practices to enable telecom managers to automate tasks, streamline internal workflow processes and contingencies, and make informed decisions using timely alerts.

This uniquely comprehensive and highly-integrated system allows for an organization-wide view of your telecom assets and expenses with the ability to effectively and efficiently manage them.  Our technologies help automate resource-intensive tasks and provide the user with the actionable intelligence to make informed decisions.

Our government customers are given assurance and state-of-the-art tools to manage, control, and collaborate their transitions. We help develop the plan that is right for the client infrastructure, not a cookie cutter approach.

DEVELOP A PLAN

A Plan should consist of (1) the Scope, (2) the Phases, and (3) the Sequence for execution of specific orders. Many of the foregoing events require issuance of orders containing various items to one or more vendors. Some orders have dependencies on other orders to be completed first. Business rules need to be established regarding when an order is deemed completed and accepted before a dependent order can be issued.

E-mail notifications and alerts are required for anyone involved or affected before, during, and after an event. The execution status needs to be tracked to ensure that the dependencies are indeed observed and the successor orders are issued by the client with appropriate reminders from the ManageRight system.

Finally, the performance measures of a vendor are required for the “Report Card”, a formal review between the client and the vendor.

ORGANIZE THE EVENT

Each Transition Event needs to have some type of organization similar to one currently available in Organizations Module as follows:

Currently, we have "Types" of Organizations (Corporate, Region, etc.). The hierarchy structure is created by the organization.

Orders are designated as Initial or Dependent (in addition to being Move, Add, Change, or Disconnect types). A Dependent order cannot be issued without completion/acceptance of an Initial order. A “Responsible Manager” is assigned to each phase to enable responsibility of assignments and ownership.

Tabs on the right:

Plan – containing overview of steps.

Scope – designate the services, locations or organizations for ManageRight included in the level selected within the transition event.

Status – table of orders (Initial and Dependent, if any) with a color coded scheme showing progress. Other status options are available for customization.

Metrics – display the event related numbers such as:

• Days before Start
• Days since Starting
• Days to Completion
• Costs
• Vendor Performance
  • Order Errors
  • Avg. Time to Respond
  • Avg. Time to Implement
  • Billing Errors
  • Quality of Experience (Scale of 1:10)

CREATE THE SCOPE

The Wizard creates the orders for each level as needed. The Org Module “tree structure” helps create events and place them in different levels of event planning / organization. The Phases structure also displays the “Plan” at a glance.

REPORTS

This is a family of reports with filters to be designated by:

• Transition Type
• Service
• Location
• Vendor
• Organization
• Performance Reports
• Status

Down time is completely eliminated because all equipment and wiring are existing and remain in place.

Determining the level of risk (i.e., Low, Medium, or High) will ensure that the program management staff exercises the proper degree of management control. This control will monitor the issue and ensure that appropriate alternative action plans are developed and implemented to minimize operational and budgetary impacts for the FTS2001 Program and its agency users.

The integration of ManageRight modules ensures that orders are tracked and once fulfilled and accepted the inventory is updated and the invoices are validated. Likewise, disconnect orders are moved into inactive inventory and expenses are properly reflected in invoices and budgets. The system also provides a mechanism for users to keep a report card on each vendor for each order, recording their overall experience.

CONCLUSION

If you feel reluctant to depend on GSA, TeleBright has a proven independent system that could mean a truly smooth transition.