Clearing Hurdles to Just-in-Time Network Lifecycle Management

The second hurdle is the lack of information integration during the planning process. Multiple plans of various technologies and geographies have to be merged, requiring rounds of iteration to ensure, for example, that the eastern and western regions have the same capacities at meet points, or that the optical infrastructure will have the bandwidth required by the IP and SONET networks that ride on it. This merging process adds considerable time to the planning cycle. And if the merging process is not done well, the network plans will not fit, costing the service provider more in resources while not providing the QoS required.

QUALITY AND DETAIL

Hurdle #3: Few metrics to determine the perfection of a network plan

Hurdle #4: Little oversight and engineering rule enforcement

Network planners do complex, multivariate planning, but are hampered by the lack of good metrics for the “perfection” of a network plan, and, in any case, have little time to search for the best solutions, due to the labor and time involved. In addition, although there are engineering rules established during the first two planning cycles, there is little opportunity to enforce these rules, with planners creating their own individual plans with loose central coordination and control.

PROCESS INTEGRATION

Hurdle #5: Poor marketing forecasts

Hurdle #6: Planning processes weakly coupled to the rest of the ERP systems

The forecasts for new service uptake are notoriously poor. Beyond the usual veracity issues that network planners and engineers have with the estimates from marketing organizations, the estimates are not usually of sufficient geographic granularity to be immediately useful to the planners in their planning. So the planners must make their own assumptions, often different from those of the marketing organization, assumptions that too often are not fed back to marketing to allow them to do a better job next time.

The network plans from most planning processes are not sufficient to move directly to implementation. When it becomes time to implement a project, the plan is passed to the network engineering organization where they use their own judgment, management dictates, rules of thumb, tools and processes to replan the network project once again. Often, this new plan looks considerably different from the one that came from the planning organization — from changes in the demand estimates due to a time lag, to not using the engineering rules established by the planning organization, to insufficient detail in the plans, requiring engineering to make further modifications to determine exactly what racks, channel units, interfaces, etc., must be implemented and in what configuration.