As many of you know, I am American. And as many of you know, in America, we in general do not really appreciate what the rest of the world knows as football, or what North Americans call soccer. As most who know me personally know, I am not a typical American. For years,I have been an avid follower of “real football “ through my loyalty to a couple of German teams (Dortmund BVB and Bayern Munchen), both cities where I have lived and have family connections.

But I have to tell you, that in this FIFA World Cup series in South Africa, I was more than a little obsessed, and yes, my favorite team was the US team. At the writing of this blog, my team was cheated out of a winning goal by a questionable call made by a referee. Would the US win the World Cup? No, not this time. But, if there is anything this year’s world cup showed us, is that it is a big world out there, and the way things were in the past (like the dominance of Germany , France and the UK), is quickly being dispelled as major, and seriously good teams from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and even the United States, change the vary complexion and nature of the sport.

Say what you will about the “fairness” of individual referees, or the many different “political quirks” that make up world football championships, in the end, the process is a basically fair and entertaining process. It is interesting to compare the overtly civilized and politically correct way that the FIFA championship is run to less professionally managed championship events like the World Wrestling Entertainment matches and Wrestle Mania.

To my chagrin, I have found that WWE wrestling matches are quite popular on cable channels around the world. In Asia, Africa and the Middle East, millions of people watch Wrestle Mania matches and view that as an example of life and sport in the US. For those of you who don’t know it yet, the WWF, unlike FIFA, is a scam. Yes, it is true. The wrestling matches that you view are a fake. They are undoubtedly entertaining, and certainly violent. However, in the final analysis, the role of the referee is not to make it fair, but to serve as another “clown” in the circus in this so-called sporting event.

But what has all of this to do with Revenue Assurance?

Here’s the thing. In my last blog, I discussed a concept I call “Revenue Mania”. And I encourage you to listen to it, or read it before proceeding with this blog. In that article, I proposed that what we are experiencing in our industry today, is a re-definition of the role of revenue assurance and revenue management in the telecom landscape.

What I also proposed was that there were many “schools” or “groups” advocating different “flavors” or approaches to how we, as a group of professionals can best advance our careers, and help our companies through our professional practices. In that article I mentioned several groups. There are people clinging to old definitions of revenue assurance; that revenue assurance is about software, that revenue assurance is about I/T and about zero tolerance advocates. I also mentioned more forward thinking schools of thought, including the “revenue assurance is about increasing profits” and the “revenue assurance is about customers” schools.

In a very real sense, we, as telecoms professionals, dedicated to the practice of at least what used to be known as revenue assurance, are in fact, participating in the equivalent of a Revenue Assurance world cup. The world over, telecom executives (CFO’s and CEO’s) are appraising the value that their revenue assurance software and hardware purchases, consulting budgets and staffing decisions and asking, “was it worth the investment?” While the majority of them have seen the value in many of these investments so far, mostof them are asking, “can we do better”? Can I get more value out of my revenue assurance Team? Should I add more staff to the team? Should I raise salary levels? Should I reorganize revenue assurance and give them different KPI’s? How can I best spread the revenue assurance goodness across my organization for the maximum benefit?

In general, I believe that this year’s exercise of Revenue Mania, is an absolutely awesome, powerful and a good thing, especially for revenue assurance professionals. But I also believe that we need to be very careful that we run our “Revenue Assurance Mania” process much more like the FIFA world cup and not like the American style “Wrestlemania”.

What does that mean? Well, first of all, it means that we should proceed with some method. We need to be sure that we are building on the things that already work, and not throw out the good with the bad. I believe that it means several things:

First – It means that we maintain a focus on the individual revenue assurance professional; their skills, strengths and weaknesses. To fall in love with an approach that existing staff cannot manage is a formula for disaster. That is not to say that we mustn’t try new things, only that we have to build on the core strengths we have, and not make professionals feel ‘left out’ and worthless.

Second – it means that we have to focus on our relationships: consensus. Building trust between professionals; this is how any professional excels. The revenue assurance professional should consider approaches that enhance and strengthen relationships with CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and operational managers, not antagonize them.

Third – the new migration paths must be rationalized. Part of the reason people abandoned the old approaches was because they couldn’t prove the value. New approaches must prove value before undertaken.

Fourth – the revenue assurance professional needs to expand the scope and re-define themselves with Integrity. They must understand the new domain and preform with precision, excellence, transparency and reliability.

Over the next few weeks, I will be initiating GRAPA’s own version of the Revenue Mania World Cup. Week by week, we will attempt to address a different aspect of the emerging trends in the practice of revenue assurance. We will explore the concepts of Revenue Management , Revenue Engineering, Revenue Optimization, Margin Assurance, Market Assurance, Revenue Governance and others. We will consider the merit of each and the underlying principles and values. We will also explore the dangers and pitfalls that each might hold for the revenue assurance professional. And finally, we will attempt to build a new operational model for how these different flavors of telco revenue management, assurance, optimization and governance can be weaved into a comprehensive framework for growth into 2011 and beyond.

The rules of the Revenue Mania World Cup will be simple. I will create a blog, or series of blogs to initiate the first round. We will then post the topic on our Linkedin, Facebook, newsletter, podcasts, GRAPA Website and other locations. We will solicit rebuttal , discussion and contribution from as many members as possible (in order to help stimulate the process, our membership managers and faculty will join in the contest).

As with the FIFA World Cup, we will do our best to keep the contest fair minded, open ended and with a clear dedication to revealing the best approaches.

We will not tolerate cheap shots, personal attacks, emotional diatribes or name calling. Our intention is to run a nice, clean competition. Other than that, I hope we get a lot of people participating in these discussions. The important thing, from my perspective, is that we hear from YOU, the membership, about these issues.

Stay tuned for some of our upcoming Revenue Mania Topics, and until next time, this is Rob Mattison saying …be safe….

I again (happily) found myself providing training for another corporate, multi-national revenue assurance group. The room was full of revenue assurance managers and team members all working for the same corporate group, but traveling from a dozen different countries around the world. It fills me with a sense of respect and admiration where I see the incredible level of sophistication, dedication and enthusiasm that these professionals exhibit.

Sitting in this room, it is clear that Revenue Assurance continues to be an exciting, challenging and ever expanding career path for those of us who have “The Right Stuff”. Just in case you think I am exaggerating about how exciting and critical revenue assurance has become to telco organizations, I have got to tell you that the organizers of this event provided me with a little “bonus” this week. They told me that I would not have to teach for the first hour, because the CEO for the entire corporate group was going to fly in and provide the kick-off for our one week training and certification event.

Some of you may be surprised that the CEO of a large corporate multinational telecommunication group would travel all that way to spend an hour addressing a room full of revenue assurance geeks. But that would mean you have not been paying attention. In the past year, we have had more than than six onsite training events where the CEO, the CFO or both have opted to kick off the event , and impress upon the revenue assurance team how much they were being counted on to help the company make its objectives in the coming year. I’ve actually had it happen where the CFO to stops by for a visit, listens in on what we are discussing, and then decides to stay around for the rest of the event.

But how do you explain this? Why have a bunch of “CDR Jockeys” suddenly come to find themselves at the leading edge of so many telco operations? It’s simple. They need us. These C Level executives are coming to understand that what we have to offer, is what they need. C Level executives are beginning to see that revenue assurance represents one of the single biggest strategic tools in their arsenal.

At one event in Latin America, the CEO of the group spent over two hours, detailing for everyone in the class what the future direction of the company was going to be. He took the participants through painstaking detail, reviewing plans for major technology upgrades (NGN, WIMAX AND LTE), new product and service delivery plans (launching dozens of new products in three short months). Most importantly, he highlighted and impressed upon everyone the critical role that revenue assurance was expected to play in each of these cases.

Talk about “stealing my thunder”. But ,that’s okay. It greatly enhances my credibility when I can tell them, “This is what is important to the CEO”, when the CEO just got through saying the same thing to them a few hours earlier.

In yet a third case, the CEO of the company addressed our class with a surprisingly clear and simple message for the students. He explained that the revenue assurance  team was a critical part of corporate strategy for the next year, and that the biggest things he needed to see, and he expected from his revenue assurance  team were:

Integrity – He spent more than five minutes drilling down on examples of how important the integrity of the people and of operations was going to be in the year ahead, and how critical the revenue assurance  team was to that strategic vision.

Proactivity – He thanked the revenue assurance  managers, and implored them to be more proactive in their zeal for seeking out risks and revenue opportunities.

If I didn’t know any better I would say that he read the GRAPA standards book on his way to the conference. That is the good news. The bad news is that with this high profile attention comes a lot of responsibility. These guys are putting confidence in us, and the want to see results. Of course, we have the knowledge, the tools and the relationships to get the job done.

In the weeks ahead, our GRAPA social networking group is going to be putting together a series of blogs, articles and interviews about GRAPA success stories, to share with everyone the amazing, compelling and interesting successes that GRAPA members are experiencing.

I hope these stories will help to inspire, enlighten and provide direction to many of you.

So, that’s enough for this week, until next time, this is Rob Mattison saying, be safe.

What do Ernst and Young, Protiviti, Infosys, PWC, Deloitte and IBM all have in common? Is it that:

a)      They are some of the largest, most successful consulting organizations in the world today?

b)      Each has a large, viable commitment to providing professional consulting services to telcos in the Internal Audit, Fraud and Revenue Assurance domains?

c)      Each has sent several of their consultants to GRAPA Certification and Training Events?

The answer is, all of the above.

I was a bit surprised last week when I had the faculty team assemble a study to review the GRAPA memberships and training attendance demographics. Several patterns emerged, but one of the most striking was the high number of consulting organizations filling the seats in GRAPA training events.

I was not surprised that consultants are involved in GRAPA. Many of the consulting firms that I mentioned have been staunch supporters of GRAPA from the beginning. Consultants fill many of the key roles on GRAPA committees, and also provide strong support for the GRAPA standards in the real world. However, what surprised me were the numbers of consultants getting certified is growing, exponentially.

Yes, consultants are coming to learn that GRAPA makes sense for them as well. Being a curious and questioning kind of guy, the first thing that I wanted to understand is why? Why have consultants started to flock to the GRAPA training and certification events?

I think there are several reasons for this. First, we have started to hear of more and more carriers placing a requirement, or at least a preference for GRAPA certification as a criterion for the assessment of job candidates. This makes sense when you think about it. With over 3500 copies of the GRAPA standards downloaded around the world, it is natural that carriers would take the next step, and ask that consultants conform to the same standards that they are practice.

Obviously, once a revenue assurance manager, CFO or auditor recognizes the value of the approach, it is simply the next step to prefer vendors who see things the same way. But, while this tendency certainly helps to explain the phenomena, I think there is even more to it than that.

There really is only one reason for any consulting company to do anything–to gain a competitive advantage. Business in general, and consulting more specifically, is an intensely competitive, highly leveraged activity. Consultants are in a constant state of  re-inventing themselves to get an edge on the competition, re-educating themselves, trying to get the advantage through advanced knowledge and skills, re-evaluating themselves and constantly working to improve their team’s and their own approaches any way they can.

Sounds exhausting, right? I worked for many companies as a Revenue Assurance and Business Intelligence practice leader for many years, and I assure you, it is all that and more. Why then, should consultants develop a preference for GRAPA and the GRAPA standards? Well actually, there are quite a few reasons.

Consultants, just like carriers, need to be concerned about whether their teams have the skills and knowledge needed to do the job and the GRAPA Body of Knowledge (an industry wide, consensus based definition of scopes) makes it easy for consulting companies to benchmark and assess their own people. The GRAPA Body of Knowledge provides a key guideline that everyone can use.

Once the Body of Knowledge was established, it was possible to put together a comprehensive Testing and Certification program. The GRAPA Training, Testing and Certification program is the largest, most pervasive and most respected revenue assurance, telecom fraud and telecom internal audit specific program in the world, as evidenced by the hundreds of people that have certified, or are in the process of certification.

But the benefit GRAPA offers consultants does not end there. In addition to the help GRAPA provides in the assessment and credentialization of their staffs, GRAPA’s industry  Practices (Principles, Methodologies and Standard Controls Based Assurance) make it easy for consulting companies to quickly step into complex situations, and conduct insightful and effective analysis and solution design, with a minimum of fuss and “start up time”. The GRAPA standards provide a common frame of reference, vocabulary and approach making it easy for consultants to step deliver value quickly and effectively.

But I think the real reason that consulting companies are finding lots of reasons to love GRAPA, is the GRAPA core philosophy. GRAPA believes and promotes that the most valuable asset  a company can have, and the best way to solve any problem is through the professionalism of the revenue assurance professionals themselves.

It is the revenue assurance professionals themselves that make the difference in any revenue assurance engagement (a philosophy that aligns perfectly with what consulting companies are selling…the professionalism of their consultants). The only real surprise is that so many consulting companies have not taken advantage of GRAPA. But that’s okay. I’m not worried. The momentum that GRAPA has established is clear. They may not be in our classrooms and taken testing yet, but they will be, or they may have to get out of the telecom business altogether.

Well, I think that’s enough for this week. Until next time, this is Rob Mattison saying. … be safe….

I survived the great volcanic ash cloud of 2010. Like many travelers around the world, I too was stranded in a place I did not want to be when Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull Volcano decided to do its thing.  We had an event scheduled in Rotterdam, and we had to cancel it while people scrambled to get transportation from once place to another.

Luckily for me however, I had a nice hotel room and no place to go for a week. For most people, a whole week stuck in a nice location would mean a chance for some sightseeing, touring or may just some heavy sleeping. But that is not for me. What I like to do when I get some time on my hands, is arrange some ad hoc meetings with revenue assurance professionals in the area where I happen to be staying.

I was fortunate and managed to meet with quite a few people, and in addition to the usual revenue assurance  team meetings, I was able to swing a few interviews with some CEOs and CFOs to get feedback on how their view of revenue assurance is changing. For many of you, the thought of a CEO or a CFO caring about revenue assurance at all might seem like a stretch.

In the places where revenue assurance teams are taking the GRAPA message to the streets, an amazing transformation occurs. Don’t get me wrong, the transformation does not happen overnight, but in those places where the revenue assurance team works hard, works smart and focuses on their core mission, amazing things happens.

Revenue assurance professionals begin to see a significant and often quite rapid change in their status. As revenue assurance professionals begin to focus more on their understanding of where the true risks to the telco’s revenues are, and get proactive in their mission to “seek out and destroy” risks to revenues in any form it happens to be in, the more revenue assurance professionals come to be perceived as a key strategic asset to top management.

In meeting after meeting, C level executives shared the various ways their revenue assurance teams are surprising them with innovative, creative and downright brilliant solutions to many of the biggest revenue protection challenges facing telcos today. If I were to summarize these stories, I would say that CEOs love GRAPA, or at minimum truly appreciate what GRAPA is doing, because of the way in which it has been helping to transform revenue assurance teams.

Among the most often cited cases that C Level executives are mentioning are:

1. The clear commitment to rationalization and the insistence of the revenue assurance team that all remedies developed are cost justified. That, keeps showing up as number one wherever we go. For many people unfamiliar with the GRAPA standards, there is a prevailing assumption that revenue assurance is some kind of “data cleansing” or “operational best practices” discipline (which is something that no C Level executive has time for). But when the revenue assurance team adopts a hard core, rationalization stance, things really begin to change.

1. CEOs and CFOs were emphatic about how much they appreciate having a team of professionals on staff that proactively looks for risks to revenues without being told to. It seems that C Level executives, like everyone else, have too many things to keep track of, and anyone who is vigilant and proactive in “keeping their eye on the revenue line” is going to attain a “favored” status very quickly.

Most surprising to me were the number of executives who told me that their number one reason for escalating the status of the revenue assurance team in their estimation, was because they were realizing that revenue assurance was their number one best line of defense against revenue loss in new product development areas. An amazing number of telcos now include revenue assurance as a critical member of the new product development team, where they are perceived as the ultimate arbiters of the speed vs. risk tradeoff that all new product development teams must deal with.

For some people getting stuck someplace for a week because of a volcano might seem like a real bother. But for me it was an amazing opportunity to get some necessary and incredibly powerful feedback regarding the job that the revenue assurance teams are doing out there.

The net result of these interviews for me, among other things, is a renewed commitment, and even more focus on the “non-traditional” revenue assurance disciplines (Margin, Market, New Product and New Technology Assurance) that the CEOs seem most focused upon.

Well, that is enough for this week. Who knows, maybe next week, I’ll get stuck someplace else, and have another chance to get more of the “C-Level” view of what is happening in telecoms, and revenue assurance today.

But until then, this is Rob Mattison, saying…be safe.

When Lightening Strikes – Botswana and Revenue Assurance

R Mattison’s Podcast

I recently spent an amazing week with a class of revenue assurance, internal auditor, fraud and telco operations professionals in Botswana. During the training two issues kept coming up: “How exactly do I set up a governance model for revenue assurance,” and “What model should be used for measuring how effective the revenue assurance team really is?”  These are interesting questions and certainly frequently asked at trainings.

If you are a follower of our blogs and of our new Corey’s Corner webinars, we are beginning to uncover some of the really critical areas where revenue assurance is asked to help when disasters strike. When the people in the class in Botswana started asking about the different controls and revenue assurance scenarios, it brought to mind a story reported to GRAPA recently.

It seems that a Latin American wire line carrier had one of its switches struck by lightening. Of course, the network engineers had to make some quick decisions about what to do. It happened that this carrier had been in the middle of a migration from the Class 4 and Class 5 switch environment, to an NGN (Next Generation Network) architecture, where the switching was managed via VOIP instead.

Since the old switch was already destroyed, the network engineers decided to cut over to the new NGN environment. Unfortunately, for the engineers, the carrier and their customers, the revenue assurance group had not been called in order to assist with “New Technology Assurance”. When the cut over happened no one checked to see if the new architecture was set up properly for accounting revenues. The result was that for over one month, customers were double billed for every call they made.

Since this group had not instituted their standard revenue assurance based “Ratio Controls” in billing, and did not institute “Change Management Controls” in the network, the customers of this telco got a little surprise in the mail: a bill twice as big as it should have been. The carrier was of course embarrassed, and they made refunds and corrected the problems, but what an incredible waste of time and money, in addition to the irrevocable damage to reputation.

The questions that the managers in that Latin American telco may have asked themselves after this happened was, “Should I have put the revenue assurance controls in place when I had the chance?” and “Would those controls have prevented this revenue disaster?”

The clear answer, in this case, was yes. The investment in those few critical controls would have more than compensated for the damage to regulatory standing, public relations and actual revenues that the “lightening strike” created.

It is easy to look back and to say “We should have done it this way.” It is another thing to develop the skill, judgment and capability to make such decisions ahead of time. This is where the beauty and efficiency of the GRAPA approach to risk and controls management comes in. Under the GRAPA approach, we do not try to tell managers or revenue assurance professionals how much risk they should be willing to take. That, according to the GRAPA standards, falls under the “Appetite for Risk” principle.

The GRAPA standards are not prescriptive. We do not provide members with a mindless checklist that allows them to say: “Well, I did what the standards told me to do, so if anything bad happens it is not my fault”. What the GRAPA standards provide is a principle based approach.
Specifically, what we identify for each area of a telco operation is:

1. A method for the diagnosis and assessment for risk in that area (forensics).
2. A set of standard controls, which is a list and explanations of the key points where the majority of telcos have been implementing controls in order to contain risks in the identified areas.
3. A method for the calibration of those controls (a range of control levels from the extremely low cost to the extremely exhaustive).

What we then count on, is the revenue assurance professional, in partnership with the management team, to work together to build the best risk management profile for their situation. In the “lightening strike” scenario, there are clearly over a dozen GRAPA standard controls that would have identified and ameliorated the risk long before the disaster that our Latin American carrier faced. What we provide is a set of “standard control points”, control points that need to be understood and applied in the most cost effective way possible by professionals. .

These standard control points define for the executive and the revenue assurance professional a comprehensive roadmap of both the minimum points of coverage required to consider an area assured. It is up to the revenue assurance team to “scale up” those controls to the level of risk containment. The net result, for our friends who trained in Botswana, and for telco management teams around the world, is a new insight and a much better understanding of the ways they can work to combat the ever increasing risks to revenue loss being faced, in the most cost effective way possible.

That is enough for this week. Remember, the next time you see a flash of lightening, or find yourself facing a revenue crisis, maybe you need to ask yourself a simple question, “Could this crisis have been averted, or minimized if I had simply implemented some basic controls in this area”. You may find, like most telcos that the cost and trouble of implementing a controls strategy will pay for itself many times over.
Until next time, this is Rob Mattison, once again saying…. be safe.

(Keep on the look out for our upcoming articles about Revenue Assurance In Haiti, and the role of revenue assurance in the earthquake zone, as well as some really interesting articles about revenue assurance in the battle zone, and learn about the unique revenue assurance challenges in Afghanistan where one of your biggest revenue assurance issues is dealing with the fact that people keep blowing up your towers and switches. )

I once again found myself conducting GRAPA training in the pretty little country of Luxembourg. In my world, ending up in the same city twice in the same year is a real bonus. I did not even have to buy a new SIM, I still had top-up on my “Tango” SIM from the last trip. I think Luxembourg with its castles, cobblestone roads and grand homes in the French royalty tradition, more than many European countries, brings to mind the “olden days”. Yes, Luxembourg clearly speaks to the grandeur of old. It would be easy to imagine fine women in billowing gowns, and aristocratic men in powdered wigs walking the streets.

However, I was not here for sightseeing. This time, we had an entire training center full of experienced revenue assurance managers. I really enjoy teaching the Core Curriculum classes. However, when I get a chance to spend a week with a group of experienced revenue assurance managers I really get excited. Just imagine a room full of men of women whose accumulated experience in telecom revenue assurance is over one hundred years. Over a century of expertise was in one room–amazing.

Of course, whenever you get a group of seasoned revenue assurance managers together, you are going to have some differences of opinion. After all, being cantankerous and assertive is clearly how we have all been able to survive this long in our high-pressure jobs. However, several things about this group stood out. When we teach our manager class, we still spend time on technical issues and techniques for revenue assurance, but we spend the major portion of the class discussing those things most critical to managers, namely:

1. Politics
2. Staffing and Team Management
3. KPI’s
4. Politics
5. Working with network, billing and customer service
6. And Politics

It is interesting to sit down and take a good look at where we have come from, and where we are going, in each of our respective groups. The average size of staff for this class was six, with some dealing with startup scenarios and others dealing with departments that have been in existence for many years. This group, like most other groups of managers we have seen had a couple of characteristics in common and that always upset me, to a certain extent. If I were to write a list of some major shortcomings in the typical revenue assurance manager, the list would look like this.

1. Pro bono work

2. Terminal Uniqueness

3. Dirty Laundry

4. The Search for Revenue Assurance Royalty

Pro Bono Work

In the legal profession, there is a special kind of casework lawyers are expected to take on known as Pro Bono work. Pro Bono work is work done by lawyers for free for people who need it, even though they cannot pay. Lawyers are expected to do this kind of work in order to “give back” to the community and to keep their skills sharp.

In the revenue assurance profession, we all have our own versions of pro bono work–like when the CFO asks you to do this or that analysis. Or when the internal auditors ask for your help on a special report or an operational manager asks you to analyze revenue reports because they know that when you look at them, they will be correct.

Do not get me wrong, I do not think there is anything wrong with revenue assurance teams doing Pro Bono work. In fact, I think it is very important they do this. It is critical to our effectiveness and the management of our relationships and marketing.

The problem I see is revenue assurance managers think they have to apologize for doing this work. They assume this kind of work is not in scope, because it does not involve counting CDR’s or building elaborate and often foolish controls over a process that works just fine without.

No, in my opinion, the problem is revenue assurance managers need to stop apologizing for doing this kind of work, and start looking for it, and including it in their scope. The problem goes back to understanding exactly what we are supposed to be doing. If our job is to count CDR’s and spend too much money on ineffective systems and solutions, then yes, this is out of scope. However, if our job is to help management and operational managers to understand their revenue risks and to maximize revenues effectively, then the more pro bono work they do, the better.

Terminal Uniqueness