In a digitally connected—and digital-reliant—world, it should come as no surprise that the volume of complex, large-scale B2B telecom projects is on the rise. And with the increasing volume, come higher stakes for managing and delivering them profitably.
The evolving challenges of managing these projects are many: unprecedented global disruption requiring constant adaptation, shrinking margins, efficiency squeezes and increasingly distributed teams dependent on collaboration for project success. Fortunately, there is a single path to success: sophisticated work and project management that optimizes profitability through every stage of work—from order to cash. The best of these solutions are uber orchestrators keeping teams, partners, customers and data aligned, in real time.
Opportunity Development: Managing Work Even Before the Project Work Begins
Effective order management is critical for B2B telecom providers. The process is operationally complex and often involves multiple sub-processes, systems, departments and partner organizations. These complexities are further compounded for large enterprise organizations, where orders can be highly customized and multifaceted.
To manage profitability, teams must align even before the order is in and the project kicks off. In fact, as early as the Request for Proposal (RFP) and opportunity development stage, decisions and actions influence profitability. This is where traditional project management solutions fall short because they only manage individual, siloed projects and teams, not the entire lifecycle of work. More sophisticated enterprise work and project management solutions address the entire lifecycle, with greater visibility, productivity and bottom-line impact—from end to end.
Work and project management solutions provide features that streamline complex pricing for B2B telecom project RFPs and enable teams with easy access to updated pricing catalogs in one system. At the opportunity development stage, work and project management can also align the right team members with the RFP responses they are most equipped to answer and the project delivery plans they are most experienced at creating, ensuring optimal use of time and resources.
Collaboration is essential to delivering a project on time and on budget at every stage, including during opportunity development. Enterprise work and project management software that enables teams to share and upload opportunity data in real time elevates collaboration so all price quotes are accurately based on the precise levels of effort, time and resources required. Smart decisions made at the quoting phase directly affect project profitability later, upon delivery.
Integrations and analytics are also important at the opportunity development stage. Seamless integration with Salesforce Vlocity, for example, makes the most complex quoting and ordering processes simpler and more accurate. Robust analytics and reporting ensure realistic timeline and budget estimates as well as project delivery plans, keeping projects on track at every step.
Telecom organizations can align complex projects throughout the entire lifecycle, from opportunity to delivery, with transformative work and project management. Watch our mini-cast to learn more.
Project Planning and Orchestration: Where Work Management Meets Collaboration
Once an opportunity is won, project planning and orchestration begins. Effective planning, and scheduling at this phase is essential. Change is constant for telecom projects. Sudden turnarounds in strategies, project scope swings, variations in constraints and shifting project milestones are not uncommon. But the slightest misstep can mean delays with lasting effects on long-term projects, and they can even negatively impact other projects in the pipeline dependent on the same resources.
Enterprise work and project management can manage and control the complexity of large-scale telecom projects by enabling the creation of all project, sub-project and site-specific plans in a central dashboard, with Salesforce Vlocity integration if needed, including automated material ordering. A 360-degree view of all layers of a project, across portfolios, allows stakeholders to roll up projects into one master view for optimal operational and financial decision making. This includes setting up individual site project plans to orchestrate and manage work by internal and external teams. Resources can be assigned based on the most current and correct availability, allowing for rapid scaling when change happens, as it inevitably will.
Through this master dashboard, teams can view and manage multiple projects for a single customer in one place. These customer-centric master dashboards result in better service and improved P&L insight.
At the project planning and orchestration stage, large–scale B2B telecom projects need seamless connectivity across departments. Different teams use different methodologies and work and project management solutions shouldn’t force consolidation to a single approach. The most effective solutions adapt to how teams work best and effortlessly connect everyone based on that, allowing hybrid approaches across projects and departments. For optimal efficiency, multiple methodologies co-exist, including Kanban, Lean, Agile, Gantt, Waterfall, hybrid, pull-planning and others, adapting and translating for streamlined project and risk management. All methods can be interconnected and unified in a virtual platform to communicate with ease and accelerate progress.
This ensures organization-wide alignment when people are socially distanced in home offices or in clusters of teams in regional satellite locations. It means teams work the way they want from a single system while increasing enterprise efficiency, control and velocity.
With this level of collaboration and transparency during the planning and orchestration stage of a project, highly informed decision making is possible. This mitigates costly mistakes and the need for rework. The most advance solutions leverage AI, advanced reporting and predictive, next-best actions to eliminate or mitigate costly issues before they occur. Good news for project profitability.
Project (and Profitability) Delivery
To navigate every complex stage of a large-scale B2B telecom project, and ultimately deliver profitably, the multidisciplinary, distributed teams of experts, contractors, field services providers need solutions to sync and share files in one central location in the cloud, eliminating disconnected spreadsheets and disparate servers. This mitigates the risk of decisions based on the wrong data. Sophisticated enterprise work and project management solutions provide the data-driven context and clarity a telco needs for project success.
With 360-degree project views and dynamic dashboards, everyone sees the latest information, which can be accessed and updated from anywhere, on any device, using sophisticated features. Managers see customer-centric master dashboards for better customer service, including field service dispatch updates. Executives have complete transparency into projects, resources, financials and priorities to better manage enterprise profitability. Even customers have access to customized dashboard data to stay informed on progress.
When powerfully integrated with Salesforce applications like Service Cloud, Einstein AI, Community Cloud, CPQ, MuleSoft, Field Service Management, Vlocity, Chatter, Slack and QUIP, enterprise work management like Leankor goes far beyond traditional project management to transform large-scale project complexity into efficiency. And ultimately, that translates to profitability. From order to cash.
To manage and profitably deliver your telco’s complex projects and enterprise-wide work, contact us for a consultation and demo. Call 888-532-6567 or email us. You can also watch our instructional video to learn more.
