How to access your Telecom Category In 4 Steps

Whether you’ve just joined your organization, or you’ve been on the job for 10+ years here are 4 ways to improve your current Telecom Category Management market performance position.

1. Ask Questions and investigate your tools and current processes.

Identify what tools (applications) and processes are used to manage your category. Your goal here is to perform a gap assessment on the effectiveness of how your category is managed today. Often times you will find out just how many hacks are in place, and what the overall confidence is of the data across your environment today.

Questions to ask \ consider:

• IT Projects: How are large scale network implementations managed from Project scope identification > RFP> Vendor selection > Award > Implementation?

• Contracts:Are contracts centrally stored? Where are they maintained? Is the information easily accessible? Can you run reports against this data? Is your renewal pipeline clear?

• Inventory:How is inventory created? Where is the information stored? How is the information updated? Who can create or edit the inventory? How do we know the inventory is correct?

• Spend: What is our current annual spend? How is our spend validated against our inventory to ensure the billing is correct?

• Supplier and VAR details: How are vendor services managed today across SLA’s and KPIs? Is there a process in place to manage supplier relationships at a strategic level with senior management both internally and externally?  Are our suppliers also our customers?

2. Collaborate with key stakeholder groups.

Ensure process-related activities address company needs.  Understand the areas your business sponsors are “happy with” across the current technology suite and identify where gaps exist overlaid with budget and time constraints.  Find out what areas are working, and which areas are broken today across your telecom category ask questions like:

• What are our telecom technology goals for this year and looking forward in the next 3-5 years?
• What areas do we need better transparency across the category?
• Do we have the right supplier mix (too many suppliers, not enough, wrong vendors in the wrong places, in-sourced vs. out-sourced etc.)?

3. Develop a business plan and process improvement plan.

Post interviews and assessment develop an execution plan to address focus areas of improvement.  

** TIP: If you’re new to the role here’s your chance to SHINE if you’ve been on the job for a while here’s your chance to improve your current situation and possibly get promoted. Often times the frustrations we face in our job is a result of lack of mandates, too many mandates, laziness, and “this is just how we’ve done it for years and we never actually took a step back to access the situation.”

• Business Process and Analysis – From the knowledge gained from speaking with various teams and departments, outline the current workflows and document key process flows, recognize processes for redesign, identify opportunities and translate business processes into information system needs.  Identify how each step and stream flow impacts the wider category management.  Define quality measurements and evaluate performance against standards and to identify issues, risks and possible paths of resolution or mitigation strategies.  Develop a list of recommendations whether it be new tools, new workflows, elimination of processes etc. to perfect the process governance framework.

• IT Business Management – Leverage the feedback from your business partners to build a plan which includes things like benchmarking your current technologies both costs and the technology vs. peers, accessing your supplier mix, evaluate trends in technology and technology delivery mechanisms.

• Set the Strategy for Execution– Ensure successful execution across business plans that are designed to maximize business partner satisfaction, commercially aligned, and implemented for effective planning, organizing, and on-going evaluation processes.

4. Drive for results for yourself and the wider team.

You kicked off this assessment now assume responsibility for seeing through the work and objectives. Set a plan of action and priorities and arrange work requirements to accomplish goals and ensure work gets completed aim to go beyond what is required.  Set high standards of performance and monitor the efforts to see things through!

Temforce fulfills the gap in technology that helps organizations handle their telecom category portfolio i.e. project demand, inventory, suppliers and spend without having to settle for lackluster applications and hacks. Temforce is built for speed and agility to get the job finished fast to free you to do more valuable planning and optimization work.  To put it simply, Temforce is a better way to manage your telecom vs. the hack.

At some point you have to question, yeah why do we do it this way? Or say enough and take action to improve things.

Be a change agent and start the movement #ditchthehack

Temforce – Category Management SaaS enabling teams to manage their Telecom, IT Categories and Suppliers through 1 easy to use application.