Chapter 17 OPERATIONS. Many projects in the telecom environment are operations projects. Most projects require some involvement from operations organizations, even if they are not centrally operations projects. In the telecom industry, “operations” encompasses many diverse functions, and often aspects of many such systems are needed. | Chapter 17 OPERATIONS Many projects in the telecom environment are operations projects. Most projects require some involvement from operations organizations even if they are not centrally operations projects. In the telecom industry operations encompasses many diverse functions and often aspects of many such systems are needed. These aspects impact the product at different times during the product life cycle so operations people should be involved in determining the aspects of the project lifecycle. The different aspects of project integration are also examined. In a telephone operating company the term operations applies to many functions which support a multitude of vastly different functions. On the line side operations includes taking trouble calls and testing circuits or equipment to locate troubles. It includes finding and fixing major problems such as fibre cuts or switching centre failures. It includes taking customer orders and maintaining customer profiles and data in databases. In the staff area operations involves the selection of development of and maintenance of operational equipment such as network management systems test systems billing systems provisioning database systems order tracking systems etc. The operations labour forces are huge and it s obvious that they are involved with products throughout their life cycle. No matter what the product is the cost of operating the product is very often greater than the cost of development and building combined. So operational considerations need to be taken into account on all products. Representatives from operations departments should participate in the planning of every project particularly in the design stages to ensure that the design can be maintained and supported hopefully at reasonable cost over the long term. 250 Operations In most cases the company will be providing some ongoing support for the product or service being developed. This support will be provided by someone from operations whether
