In Sync

Have you launched a new product after months of market research, only to be disappointed by the high cost and time delays incurred from implementing an over-designed solution? Or perhaps a low-cost solution resulted in poor performance and reliability? How will you ensure this doesn't happen for your next product or service launch?

Your biggest challenge may be getting your engineering and marketing organizations to speak the same language. You must ensure the two groups are in sync with one another when defining a new product's expectations and implementation. This can be achieved by jointly defining the key attributes for your new product, assigning appropriate service-level values to each attribute and verifying that the implementation solution sufficiently supports these requirements without going overboard.

DEFINE PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES Although agreeing internally on a new product's attributes and service-level values will not guarantee it will be a hit with your customers, it will usually determine the implementation's success. Most products and services include the following attributes:

* Cost, including implementation and operating costs

* Capacity, which defines the number of customers and their usage profiles

* Performance, which is the required response time for each component

* Availability. How reliable does your product need to be? Is it mission-critical, or can customers and your business tolerate downtime?

* Operability. How will you operate the product? Will it be part of your mainstream operations, or will a special group support it?

Many times, a new product will implicitly have two different sets of service levels. An initial set of service levels is intended during a proof-of-concept phase with an additional set of service levels required when the service fully launches.

If you plan to use two different sets of service levels for a new product, you must clearly define them up-front. This process will help your engineering and planning groups clearly understand how the implementation must evolve.

DEFINE COMPONENTS Components are the functional parts of a product or service. Dividing a product into individual components allows you to specify multiple service levels within each product attribute. You should define the components from a customer's perspective, and they should not reflect a specific implementation. Consider voice mail, which can be divided into the following components: message deposit, message retrieval, message-waiting notification and activation/deactivation. These components may be replicated for each attribute or used for attributes that require this level of granularity.

DEFINE SERVICE-LEVEL TARGETS Your marketing and engineering groups must agree on the component service-level values for each new product attribute. The temptation here is to start aligning service-level assignments with the proposed implementations. Don't do this.

You must base service-level values on customers' product requirements and keep them independent of the implementations being considered. You may find it necessary to modify your initial attribute and component definitions before you can agree on the service-level values.

The availability attribute usually needs to be defined for at least three different types of outages. They are planned, unplanned and rare-event. Schedule planned outages during your network's non-busy period, but keep in mind that some planned outages will be required during the busy period. Note the tighter availability targets for busy-period outages. The busy period can be whatever you define for your network, but it is usually 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Rare events, in this example, are events that have a low probability of occurring more than once every 10 years, such as a switch-site outage. The rare-event outage service levels in the first row (more than 25% of customers) for the deposit and retrieval components require a service-restoration scheme employed for this product.

DEFINE PRODUCT CATEGORIES Group each product into product categories based on similar characteristics. Some carriers further divide the components into geographic areas. These different areas typically are based on cell density and allow different service-level assignments for urban and rural areas, as shown for voice-call delivery.

Your engineering organization now understands the service-level values that must be calculated for each implementation option. These calculations are based on empirical data from your current network and information provided by potential new equipment suppliers.

It is beneficial to define high-level implementation diagrams for each product component. These are especially helpful in understanding the calculations necessary for the performance and availability service levels.

Now you can evaluate how well your proposed implementation options align with product service-level requirements. If gaps exist, you must agree on changes to the requirements, modify your proposed implementation, or do both. When you have adjusted all of these gaps, your product implementation will meet your anticipated market requirements and will be the biggest hit with all of your customers.