Working with French Telecommunications Operators

The telecommunications world is a successful example of technology standardisation. In the mobile industry GSM gave the ecosystem (operators and suppliers) a set of standards that removed a lot of technology risks, enabled the birth of a large set of suppliers and product offering and gave customers roaming benefits and interoperability.

In the area of project management itself a significant amount of work is being done to develop standards: PMBOK and Prince2 are the leading example.

Those standards are important but not enough as their practical side is not developed at all (at least for PMBOK), they are standards and not methodology. Standardisation has however not fully reached the area of project management when it comes to systems integration within a telecommunication operator environment. Why? A lot of local, cultural practices hinder the application of common approaches, but also and most importantly the variety of project sizes. Another reason is that there is no standardisation body so standards or guidelines have been defined by companies themselves often to industrialise their own processes.

So as a supplier is entering into a working relationship with an operator, it usually has to match its own process with that of the operator. In a way process integration has to happen before the integration of the product or service itself.

This article instantiate this issue and highlights some essential information about french telecommunications operators typical systems integration processes, it is mainly aimed at giving solutions vendors an understanding of the systems integration requirements that will likely to be part of their contractual obligations. This paper was written based on practical knowledge of working with three mobile operators in France. At the time of writing there are only three mobile operators in France (Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom) and a 4th operator (Free) has been awarded a 3g licence in late 2009.

1. Documentation

In general the documentation requirements are fairly demanding. Suppliers are likely to be asked to document:

• the logical and physical aspect of the solution,
• the detailed IP flows,
• the configuration of all elements of the system,
• the hardware set-up,
• the racking set-up and the cabling,
• the software releases notes.

Usually English is accepted - however sometimes requirements are documented in French, particularly for "standard" requirements that are imposed on all suppliers. This covers aspects such as Monitoring, Backup and Restore, Security, Remote connection, Database design, ...Up to the supplier to get them translated.

Suppliers often are not used to produce all required documentation, leading to extra documentation effort and the need of specific skills for those documentation.

Tips for suppliers: Ensure documentation requirements are understood and that appropriate resources are lined-up to address them.

2. Acceptance phases

The overall acceptance life cycle should not be of any surprise to anyone in the industry. The advise here is to look into the details right at contract stage in order to make sure the work to be produced is understood. Before any attempt to deliver anything to the operator premises the supplier may be asked (not all operator request this) to perform some tests at the supplier premises, on an environment similar to that of the operator.

It's called "Preliminary acceptance test" and should be considered as a FAT (Factory Acceptance test). This is to ensure that what will be shipped to the customer premises will actually be worth testing. Clearly one of the challenge here is for suppliers with highly industrialised processes where usually no FAT is performed.

The acceptance workflow, starts with the Technical verification ("Verification technique") which is about the verification that the hardware, software versions and configurations are delivered as per specifications. The goal is to catch and fix any issues that would otherwise jeopardise the validity of the next - longer -acceptance phases. Practically speaking this Technical Verification step will involve: checking that the hardware matches the bill of material (servers, processor speeds, memory, hard drive space, power supplies, ...), check OS and other third party software licences, checking that the configuration of the system is documented (and check that the documentation is accurate), checking that cables are labelled and the labelling documented, checking power redundancy.

Next step is Interconnection testing ("Tests d'interconnection") which is about verifying that the supplier's system can actually connect to the operator environment. This often means testing every single IP flow that the solution needs, even for IP flows within the supplier's own system and testing basic use cases of the solution to give confidence that the solution is fit to enter the next step, Conditional Acceptance.

Conditional Acceptance ("Acceptance conditionnelle", or "VABF (Validation Au Bon Fonctionnement)" which means "Functional acceptance") is usually called "Customer acceptance tests" (CAT) outside of France. This is the lenghtiest of all phases. It is about testing that the solution delivers the product requirements. There is a high probability that the supplier is going to be asked to perform Backup and Recovery testing, Performance testing and Failover testing. Those more "operations" tests are sometimes called "VABE (Validation a la bonne exploitation)".

Once Conditional Acceptance is granted the systems is usually ready to go live. But that's not the end of the acceptance process. A last step, VSR ("Validation en Service Regulier" which means "Normal operation acceptance") is required. VSR is lengthy (we are talking one to two months) but does not eat up a lot of resources. It consists in monitoring the system for a period of time and ensure that agreed KPIs are met over that period. If the KPIs are met then Final Acceptance is granted. Note that VSR only applies to the production environment.

Who does what?

This really depends on the operator and their staffing level (quality and quantity), but in most case the supplier usually drives the acceptance phases, providing test documentation, executing tests and documenting test results. French operators are usually more demanding in documentation and formalism than others. Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly understood.

Workflow: Test and Live system

As a general rule: activities on the production environment cannot start unless Conditional Acceptance is reached on the Test environment. This is a general rule however in practice Technical verification and Interconnection testing on production could be run in parallel to the Test environment Conditional Acceptance.

Tips for suppliers:

1. Ensure that the payment milestone at Final Acceptance is small and that most payment is done at Conditional Acceptance.
2. French are heavily "contract" driven so: spend time understanding your contract commitments (review those Annexes with "standard" requirements that contains things that you don't do as "standard").
3. Be upfront on the workload that operators are requesting from you with there documentation and testing requirements - are they ready to pay for all this?
4. Do involve a project manager during the pre-sale activity.
5. Negociate what happens to the VSR if Conditional Acceptance does not lead to an immediate go-live for reason outside of your control. This could indeed delay the Final Acceptance payment milestone.
6. If your integration staff is based abroad and travel to Paris to perform the Acceptance tests then you will be better off (and they will be happier) if you rent a flat for a short term.

3. Management: decision making, project management

As with many big organisations decision making will appear opaque, fuzzy, complex and more annoyingly: slow. This is more of a characteristic with large organisations than with French organisations, however because French corporations are usually more hierarchical than Anglo-Saxon's the problem is more evident. The main day to day problem a supplier's team will encounter is the lack of end-to-end ownership by the operator's project manager.

As part of the integration requirements suppliers could find some 'management' related requirements. They should not overlook them:

• Quality management systems
  Operator will have an interest in the supplier's quality management system. When no certification is available operators are keen to understand the steps taken to get to some level of certification in the future. Suppliers will have to figure out how strongly the operator feels about those requirements and this depends on the criticality of the system delivered.
  
  
• Specific reporting
  Supplier may be asked to report on project progresses with specifics metrics and KPIs. This should not be a problem or cause significant efforts.
  
  
• Audits
  Audits are always mention in a standard contract and could happen so suppliers should ensure they understand the requirements and get ready to open their HQ doors to auditors. The scope of the audits is usually the Quality management system.

Tips for suppliers:

1. Do not overlook "standard non-technical requirements" - failing to meet them could expose you to not meeting "Acceptance" and potentially could lead to penalties.

4. A few cultural tips

A few tips about french work culture and practices - take it with a pinch of salt though.

1. Meetings and conference calls. Expect people to be late for meetings and conference call. This is annoying for most but french usually find it normal to be late by 5-15 minutes. In meetings you will sometimes witness an separate discussion starting in french, in parallel to the main one.
2. Technical background. As a rule of the thumb expect attention to details specially when dealing with technical topics. The french education systems favors scientific studies over business studies and you will probably feel it when dealing with french companies. It comes to a point where the purpose of the project, the business purpose, seems to be less important than the technical aspect of the project.
3. Start late-finish late-lunch. Empiracal evidence shows that management usually tend to start their day late and finish late in the evening. So the english "9 to 5" is more likely to be "9.30 to 7 with a 1 hour lunch break"
4. Outsourced workforce. Current employment legislation in France makes it hard for companies to decrease their workforce at will, so to limit the number of permanent employee they are using IT services companies, "Body shops", to provide temporary workforce. The operators' technical team usually has a good share of those temporary staff. They usually are quiet integrated. Note: the freelance market is nearly non existant in France.

5. Final words

Managing systems integration projects with French operators is usually challenging but it does not has to be this way. As with all contracts suppliers have to understand what they are signing for, getting to that understanding is where the difficulty is.

Suppliers should take particular care at pre-sales stage to understand in details what is asked from them.

During project execution suppliers should make sure that communication management is particularly taken care of to remove misunderstanding and constantly seek validation of what is being communicated, this is an extra effort required because of the generally average english speaking skills in France.