David Young

IT / Telecoms Consultant, Programme Manager and Business Coach

Project Manager, IP Telephony infrastructure roll-out and migration – Leading Media Company

Summary:

The client’s mission was to rationalise eight operational buildings to three (in a 3 month period), whilst using the opportunity to refresh their telephony technology. Due to the client’s 24x7 nature, this required careful planning and detail oriented management to assure no interruption in business critical operations. The move to a new ‘main building’ and tight contractual timeframe for release of the old building further compounded the critical nature of this project (there could be no going back). David:

  • Project managed both internal and external parties, ensuring a sufficiently detailed plan was held with suppliers
  • Collected detailed requirements by:
    • Facilitating workshops and building templates and support / help documents, developing open relationships with users
    • Forming the outputs into a series of work packages and configuration tables for suppliers to work with
  • Corralled customer stakeholders to make and own decisions and sign-off configurations
  • Managed the build:
    • Telephony system pre-stage build and test & delivery
    • Initial build, system testing and user acceptance testing
    • Full roll-out and load-testing
  • Managed the migration:
    • Working with existing telephony suppliers to understand current infrastructure and configuration
    • Planning a detailed, step-by-step ‘zero-down time’ migration path
    • Planning and implementing user training
    • Working with several carriers to port and divert DDI number ranges
    • Managing the daily steps of a 3 phased migration, co-ordinating on-site resources and users
  • Decommissioned old systems
  • Managed Risk and Issues and reported status and progress to senior management

    • Specific Achievements:

  • Re-set professionalism and level of engagement of key supplier (which otherwise would have compromised delivery)
  • Opened knowledge of the proposed systems, their features and potential risks, to the user base
  • Rationalised changing requirements (due to concurrent organisational re-design)
  • De-risked business operations through direct engagement with each moving team (67 in total)
  • Assured high quality results through careful attention to detail
  • Gained very positive feedback from sponsor and senior stakeholders

    • Key Skills Deployed:

  • Senior stakeholder management (Cxx level)
  • Active Risk Management
  • Supplier Management
  • Workshop Facilitation
  • Technical Problem Resolution
  • Detailed Requirements Documentation
  • Measurement and reporting of issues, improvement and successful resolutions
  • Tenacity to achieve required results

    • Outcome:

    A seamless migration on time and within budget. Users were able to move out of one building and into the next with no down-time. Senior stakeholders were in disbelief that such a project could go without hitch.

     

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