Program management is about the marriage of vision and strategy with seamless rivet-by-rivet execution, and a little damage control on the side. Whether you simply need to reduce your wireless telecommunications costs without wholesale change, need to add capacity or new capabilities and features, or need to build something from the ground up, Sur Solutions has the deep experience and broad skill set to keep you sleeping at night.
- Program management is the art and science of managing multiple projects, sometimes across multiple organizations and even businesses. This can be quite complex when many of the variables and dependencies involve the technologies of wireless telecommunications. A single program can involve network upgrades, changes to SLAs (service level agreements) and other services, network baselining and performance measurements, managing vendor relationships, resolving conflicts…you get the idea. You need to focus on your customers, not on your infrastructure.
- Realistically, a sizeable percentage of large program initiatives fail to meet objectives, are delivered late, or are over-budget. The reasons are always a complex mix of communications problems, inadequate program management skills, and underestimating program complexity. Add to this a lack of integrated planning and resources, no clearly defined success metrics, and mismanaged expectations, and you can see that there is a veritable mine field of failure opportunities. You cannot take this lightly.
- What is needed is a turn-key solution – top to bottom. The challenge is finding the personnel with the breadth and depth of experience to handle everything from contract negotiations and mergers / acquisitions, to RFP, RFI, and RFA creation and response, and even to performance and expense management. The significant challenge is finding someone skilled enough to be a single point of contact, to take your essential wireless telecommunications programs from the initial idea and concept, through development and implementation, to post-deployment maintenance.
Look at any professional athlete when she is getting ready to compete. There is a narrowing of focus, a fine-tuning of purpose – a look in the eyes that says, “It’s on”. This kind of intensity, when applied to keeping your key communications programs on track, guarantees precision planning, the ensures the ability to adapt and change, and drives relentless execution. Sur Solutions knows this feeling – we live it.
- Program management is not just project management at scale, not just a matter of using the same skills on extra-large projects. As program managers, we at Sur Solutions know how to juggle risk, performance, and communication, while at the same time keeping the stakeholder and organizational plates spinning. With our deep wireless telecommunications knowledge, we are uniquely poised to make sure all individual projects are properly coordinated at both a business and technical level.
- We know the difference between strategic program management and tactical project management. For example, as executive-level program managers, we know how to deal with change, particularly as business goals and market conditions change. We know that programs are usually tied to an organization’s strategic and financial calendars, more so than individual projects, and programs require a distinctly different kind of governance and adherence to process (or non-process!) than do individual projects. In addition, what we do as program managers will have a positive effect on your organization’s financial results.
- When it comes to program management, not only is it essential that an intelligent strategy be followed from the top down, but, as they say, the devil is also in the details from the bottom up. Finding personnel with management skills ranging from the preparation of, and the response to, RFPs / RFAs / RFQs / RFIs, we ensure as program and product managers to represent our clients with topmost confidence.
It works because we know how to make it work. At Sur Solutions, we manage with initiative, we manage at the boundaries between projects, we influence and build the consensus as needed, leading by the implicit authority of hard-won experience and skill.
Sometimes the need for coordinated program management starts with a symptom – something not right in your organization’s performance. For example, we recently worked with a client who’s customer was withholding payment on telecommunications products and services rendered. An initial examination revealed cost overruns and schedules not met.
It was clear that these symptoms spanned more than a single business unit within our client’s organization. Indeed, it was clear that the symptoms crossed company lines.
We immediately began a root-cause analysis – focused, but open to the obvious as well as the undercurrents of cause and effect. Several techniques were employed including interviews with key personnel, and an in-depth policy and contract review. We gathered information across organizational and company boundaries. We provided reports and again elicited as much feedback as possible. Customer-centric, taking everything into account.
A part of the analysis that cannot be understated is the analysis surrounding the wireless telecommunications performance and infrastructure. Very often it is necessary to perform system baselines, monitor performance, and even conduct a deep-packet analysis to ensure that the telecommunications part of your program is managed appropriately.
Once the collaborative analysis was finished, we proposed a multi-project program that resulted in the following resolutions:
• Fixed process issues, resulting in implementation of changes across business units.
• Deployed a closed loop corrective action to ensure issues such as this do not happen again.
• Provided adequate training to the staff for handling of similar situations.
• Organization level changes to ensure how the company’s front-line employees interact and handle this situation.