Revenue Assurance Sufi Style

 

R Mattison’s Podcast

 

One of the rewards of traveling is seeing the different ways people around the world live, work and play. During our recent  Dubai GRAPA training event, Brigitte and I took an evening off to go on a Dune Bashing – Desert Retreat. Brigitte, Friday our good friend from Nigeria, and me along with three Japanese tourists were whisked across the dunes of the Sahara dessert in SUV’s and Humvee’s at incredibly high speeds. After a 45-minute drive to the middle of the dessert, the adventure began. At the end of the ride, we were to be left at a dessert “oasis” and offered local cuisine, camel rides, and the opportunity to bargain for stuffed camel dolls and watch local entertainment.

I was very worried about Brigitte on this outing. Brigitte gets sea and airsick all the time, and the people at the tourist board warned us not to eat lunch, since there was a good chance that we would “lose it” after the wild ride through the dessert. But, off we tore through the dessert, up one dune, down the other, swerving, falling, twisting and turning. At first, it was exciting. Then after about 15 minutes, my stomach started to get funny and my skin turned an odd shade of green. Yes, I got motion sickness.

Brigitte had a great time, screaming and enjoying herself, but by the time we got to our destination, I could barely stand I was so nauseous. We were dropped off and I fell to the desert floor, staring at the sky, hoping the world would stop spinning. After I recovered, they took us to our oasis. The food, socializing, music and dancing were quite interesting.

For those of you not familiar with Middle Eastern cultures, there is a group in the Middle East known as the Sufis who are famous for, among other things, their style of dancing. For the Sufi, dancing is a form of prayer. This is accomplished by spinning around and around and around to the music, faster and faster for minutes and minutes.

It is amazing to watch, and I cannot imagine how the dancers do it. The Sufi dancer we watched just kept spinning around to the music. After some time, his assistant started throwing things to him. The most amazing thing was his incredible sense of balance. Of course, after I had just had trouble standing up after a few lousy minutes in a jeep, here is this person spinning around faster than a top maintaining perfect poise and balance.

The feeling of being turned in a million different directions, and being “dizzy” and suffering from vertigo is no new experience for the revenue assurance professional. We are constantly tugged and pulled in different directions, and many revenue assurance professionals complain about being unable to “get their bearings” when it comes to exactly what they should be doing and where they should be focusing. The image of the Sufi dancer, spinning and spinning with perfect balance and harmony is a fitting image for what the truly talented revenue assurance professional should be.

I recently read an interesting article about the challenging “balancing act” that all professionals need to deal with, and I thought it would be good to share some of it with you. As professionals, especially as revenue assurance professionals in telecoms, there are several contradictory things we have to keep in mind as we do our jobs. Several things require us to continually balance our approach to problems, including:

Taking the Initiative vs. Following the Rules

One thing that managers complain about more than anything else is employees who do not take initiative to identify problems. Clearly, for the revenue assurance professional, waiting until someone tells you to check into things can mean the difference between preventing a crisis and dealing with a major revenue loss disaster. Initiative, the willingness to be proactive and to anticipate problems is a highly valued trait.

On the other hand, being proactive is not license to behave in an unrestrained manner.  Good professional behavior is guided by the social and business-related expectations of coworkers and managers across the organization. The balancing act is this:  To show initiative and independence on the one hand; while observing the prevailing social norms and the expectations of business associates on the other.

For example, managers often expect their direct reports will get things done more or less independently, without constant direction from above.  Employees who are “initiative-takers” and “self-starters” are valued…up to a point.  The balancing act for employees is to take initiative that is bound and guided by the strategies of their supervisors and the overall mission of their firm.

Acting professionally means demonstrating individualism in ways that are subtle, observe locally prevailing norms of behavior, and do not annoy or unduly distract the others with whom one is interacting.  It means not demonstrating one’s individualism in ways that strongly call attention to oneself.  Second, acting professionally means taking initiative on behalf of the firm in ways that support the strategies of one’s superiors.  Initiative is properly directed in support of the employer’s objectives, not one’s own unique ideas.

Pushing for Solutions without Offending People and Seeming Rude

The telecom industry, more than any other, admires self-reliance.  Individuals are able to be self-reliant, in part, by obtaining what they want through acting assertively towards others.  Personal assertiveness, or “directness,” is often expected, but too much of it can be interpreted as being aggressive.  The difference
be
tween enough and too much is determined by the employee’s sensitivity to others.

Similarly, self-assurance is good…to a point.  When it shades over into arrogance – a demonstration of one’s certainty that their own view is infallible – others quickly react negatively.  It is never complimentary when someone is viewed by others as opinionated, dogmatic, or arrogant. One of the biggest problems that we face as revenue assurance professionals is the tendency to translate our opinions, no matter how well researched or justified, into dogmatic declarations of this is how it works.

In our GRAPA training events, one of the first social challenges we face when we get revenue assurance professionals from different carriers together, is to teach members to communicate in ways that are not so dogmatic and absolute. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to caution people who make statements like; “This is how it is done,” “Everyone does it this way,” or “You have to do this.”

Being bold and definitive is a natural reaction to situations where we are unsure of ourselves, or surrounded by people who know less than we do. However, there is a difference between respectful confidence and aggressive bluster. Acting professionally means being flexible in the practice of our assertiveness and self-assurance. It means making sure we vary our assertiveness based upon times, situations, and people.  This ability to adapt our level of assertiveness must be managed by our awareness of the likely effect it will have on others.  The professional constantly tries to be sensitive to others, thereby learning how to modulate his or her behavior.

Respecting Deadlines but Being Flexible and Patient with Problems that Arise

In the hectic world of telecoms, executives and coworkers are highly conscious of time. Activities are scheduled in advance, and people follow these schedules as much as humanly possible.  Activities are expected to begin
and end on time. Being punctual is about being sensitive to the needs of others, who are also following preplanned schedules.

People also have many responsibilities and tasks to attend to daily.  Sometimes a particular responsibility or task, may take more time to accomplish than might seem reasonable.  So, along with punctuality, one needs patience.  Being patient is about being sensitive to others’ workloads and priorities.

Two related points need to be made.  First, managers take deadlines seriously.  When a task is clearly high-priority and/or its completion is critical to the work of others, the deadline should be met.  It is not good to miss a deadline.  However, one should agree in advance only to a “realistic” deadline. Second, for many, family responsibilities take precedence over business responsibilities.  In many business settings, a person’s explanation for lateness or a missed deadline will be more readily accepted if a family emergency is the reason.  Note, however, that this is not uniformly true!

Acting professionally means being conscious of other people’s constraints with respect to time and timings.  One respects other people’s schedules by arriving on time and meeting deadlines that are viewed as critical.  But one also respects coworker’s and manager’s huge load of responsibilities by not constantly prodding them about the completion of tasks. . . other than the most critical tasks.

As we can see, the job of the revenue assurance professional, like the balancing act of the Sufi, can only be accomplished with a great degree of care and practice. Our Sufi dancer didn’t learn how to be well balanced in one day. He practiced for years to accomplish the level of skill he exhibits.

In the same way, we revenue assurance professionals must constantly stay aware of, and focus on our need to find the right balance in our professional practice. It is a full time job for anyone to:

• Be sensitive to the individual egos, and the needs and constraints that our coworkers face, while being patient as they figure out how best to do a job in a productive way (the consensus principle).
• Be assertive, and promote what is right for the good of the company, (the integrity principle).
• Do this in a way that focuses on maximizing revenues to the firm (the rationalization principle).

I hope that you find, as I did, that this way of looking at our jobs offers some interesting insights into some of the ways we can improve ourselves in our professional practice.

Well, I think that is enough for this time so, until next week, this is Rob Mattison saying… BE SAFE.

When it comes to revenue assurance there are a number of areas of concern.

We need to be aware of our organizational positioning and the way that we integrate revenue assurance into the overall operational framework of our companies. We need to worry about the technology, the systems, the organizations and the environmental factors that make up our environment, and that make revenue assurance easy or hard. We need to understand that in the final analysis, what most people want to know is: how exactly is it done? What are the standard practices that people follow in order to do revenue assurance in this area? How do I know if I am doing too much, too little or just the right amount? This is where Standard Practices come in.

The GRAPA standard practices library attempts to pull together a complete inventory of the various methods that people use to assure particular areas. After collecting the information through benchmark studies and interviews we pull together the best approximation possible of a Standard Practices portfolio. This portfolio provides GRAPA members with an understanding of key areas to watch, and what the standard approaches are to assuring them.

In this series, we will share with you the different perspectives that the membership has on the standard, best and worst practices reported. Our objective in this case is to let everyone know what our current knowledge of standard practices is, and to give everyone a chance to “weigh in” about whether the practices:

1.    Make sense – Is this framework logical.
2.    Are realistic – Are these practices realistic and applicable in their cases.
3.    Are comprehensive – Have we missed anything important that you are aware of.
4.    Are followed – are they actually followed by your organization?

Our practices track will couple an online benchmark survey encouraging all members to let us know how they practice assurance in the area under review, postings to blogs, with commentary, feedback and insights provided by our panelists and townhall (live webinar) and recorded (YouTube) presentations which will help illustrate the points.

We hope that you find this series informative and helpful.

The standard format for the lead article will be:
1.    Background: A definition of the area, the functionalities and issues surrounding the area.
2.    Context: A review of the current operational environment typical for the area.
3.    Controls Inventory: An inventory of the standard controls most commonly found associated with the area.
4.    Range of Practices: A review of some best, worst and standard practices experienced by the contributor.
Please feel free to review, comment upon and make use of what we hope will be a very informative and useful series.

Continued – Standard, Best and Worst Practices in Mediation Systems Management

Will 2009 be “the year of the revenue assurance professional?” It’s funny how things work out. Since the earliest days of telecommunications there’s always been someone, some small group of people, who kept their eyes on the revenue stream and fought to make sure that the telecommunication company realized as much revenue as possible. Back in those olden days the job wasn’t given much credit and it certainly wasn’t formally defined. In those days it was just expected that everything would and should be working without those pesky “leakages”.

Of course over time, things changed. The complexity of the technology went up astronomically and exponentially. We went from a world that we thought was really technologically sophisticated (the world of circuit based voice telecommunications), to a world that makes those technologies look simplistic and childish.

The simple 1:1:1:1 business model of the telco (one product, one market, one price and one sales channel) has been replaced by a cacophony of products, technologies, market segments, price schemes and sales channels. Yes indeed, telecommunications has grown up. The level of service delivered today is a thousand times greater, of higher quality and reaches billions of people, while at the same time delivering at a lower cost and lower margin. So for this industry, the economic hard times of 2008-2009 are nothing new.

Telco teams are no strangers to credit crunch, budget cuts and the need to do more with less. Heck, for most of us it is more than “business as usual”– it’s the challenge that got us hooked on working for telecoms in the first place.

So what is so different about 2009? Why do I believe that 2009 is going to be a banner year for revenue assurance as a serious professional endeavor? Well, it’s really just a matter of timing.

RA  Pros Becoming the ‘Go To’ Resource

For the past decade or so, the once small and dedicated (and informally assembled groups) of revenue assurance professionals have been gaining momentum. More and more, the revenue assurance team is being turned to as the “go to guys (and gals)” for an ever widening circle of telco operational and financial challenges.

When GRAPA first surveyed of the scope of revenue assurance in telcos around the world, the vast majority of the groups were relegated to the traditional “switch to bill”, CDR policing role. Over the past few years, this scope has exploded. Larger and larger numbers of telcos are turning to the revenue assurance team to address and solve some of their toughest problems.

Telcos asked, “How do I make sure that new products are released with the right price, and with the right infrastructure to guarantee financial success ?” Increasingly the answer is, “Let the revenue assurance team tackle that one; who else is better qualified?”

These are only a few of the questions:

• How do I determine the actual loss of revenue represented by radio network failures?

• What do I do about these losses?

• How can I maximize my revenue stream by making my pricing plans sensitive to the regional, metro, MSC or BTS level?

That’s the kind of puzzle that those RA guys should be able to handle. Yes, management’s respect, or at least tentative, wary and provisional hope for big gains from the revenue assurance teams has been on the upswing for some time now.

The reason why is clear. Revenue Assurance people are Darned Good at what they do. I have met hundreds of revenue assurance professionals and managers from around the world, and there are several characteristics we all seem to share.

1. Curiosity: A natural desire to understand how things work, or why they have gone wrong.

2. Stubbornness. Revenue assurance people just won’t let go until the puzzle is solved and the problem is resolved.

3. Mental acuity: (In other words, the ability to be very flexible in our thinking). Revenue assurance people can take a problem and simultaneously review and understand it from a technical, logical, operational, political and market perspective and weave all of those perspectives together into an optimum solution.

4. Creativity: Revenue assurance people are good a “patching together solutions” that nobody has ever thought of before.

So, over the past couple of years, the revenue assurance teams at hundreds of telcos have been earning their stripes. They have been earning respect, recognition and the attention of quite a few CFO’s and CEO’s.

So what is so special about 2009?

Well, from one perspective, nothing at all. It is just business as usual, and I am sure that the majority of revenue assurance teams will continue to do what they have been doing, building up their credibility in an ever widening circle of influence. But from another perspective, I think that there is something else happening here.

You see, as the RA teams continue to grow and expand (evidenced by our benchmarks), the very culture of the telco is changing. Revenue assurance is becoming more than just that “weird concept” or that “receptacle for miscellaneous finance and leakage issues”. It becomes legitimate.

Yes, we as a profession, and so many of the hundreds of teams that I have met with, are coming of age. And with that maturity come some benefits, but also some responsibilities. You see, when you have managed to “score so many goals” in such a short time management comes to expect this as a matter of course. They expect a goal every time you get onto the field. And therein lies the risk.

I believe that 2009 will be the pivotal year for revenue assurance because if we are going to survive as a profession we are going to have to figure out how to make ourselves viable and valuable players every day. Oh, discovering and bringing in the “big win” is gratifying, but sooner or later all of the long hanging fruit has been harvested. This then, is the real challenge of the revenue assurance team.

Positioning RA Professionals as Part of the Team

How do we position ourselves as the group that provides this kind of value every day. In other words, how do we formalize, normalize and make ourselves a truly functional part of the team, and not just the “one hit wonders”. That’s what I believe the challenge of 2009 is really going to be all about.

I believe we’re going to find there are two situations that revenue assurance teams will find themselves in this year.

The first group will be those who are just getting their “feet wet” in the serious game of revenue assurance. These teams, if they execute well, will find ample opportunities to deliver big value to their companies as the current economic crunch forces management to make cuts and try to figure out how to do more with less. Indeed, these teams are sitting in the perfect position right now. They have the chance to deliver high value gains to management just at the time it is most needed.

The second group will be those RA teams that are more mature. These teams have harvested all of the “quick wins” and are now faced with yet a new set of challenges: how to expand their scope and expertise, allowing them to gain insight, access and understanding of an ever broader range of operational areas that badly in need of assurance activities.

For both teams I think that there are several imperatives that they need to take into the year of 2009.

First – focus on rationalization. Make sure that everything that you work on and invest in results in a clear return on investment that management can see. This is not the time to be trying to “clean house” and “make things nice”. It is the time for bold action and serious cost savings, revenue recovery or loss prevention.

Second – focus on the expansion of your domain. Crisis = Opportunity. The RA team will find more areas than ever where operational teams have “dropped the ball” on key revenue chain integrity issues. The chances of the existing operational teams to suddenly discover leakages is low. The chances of these teams “cutting corners” and allowing vast, new risks to revenue streams to appear are great. A vigilant RA team will deliver more value than ever during times like these.

Third – focus on the expansion of your knowledge and skills. You are not going to be able to expand your domain without a concomitant expansion of expertise.

1. You need to hire people who can quickly add expertise in those areas where it is most badly needed. Are you light in the network operations knowledge area? Then find someone who knows that domain. Are you short on business intelligence, forensics and analytics depth? Time to start looking in uncommon places for uncommon skills.

2. You need to make more partnerships with more operational teams. Beg, borrow, steal and “wheel and deal” to get the inside access to the information that will make it possible for you to do your job.

3. You need to commit yourself and your team to continuing education. No one can do this job without training, knowledge and access to education. No network engineer would pretend to be viable without a continuous commitment to learning all of the latest technologies. No internal auditor can maintain his professional standing without meeting the industry’s continuing education requirement, and no revenue assurance professional can hope to keep up without the same commitment.

I am sure that if you pursue the new year with these key perspectives in mind, you will create for yourselves and your department a much stronger, more respected and more formally recognized revenue assurance role in your organization.

So, will 2009 be ‘The year of the Revenue Assurance Professional?’ I think, that yes, it will for Revenue Assurance Professionals who take advantage of the incredible opportunity that has been presented to us.

Rob Mattison

GRAPA