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What do you want from the next Revenue Assurance Survey?

03 Jan 2017
What do you want from the next Revenue Assurance Survey?

What do you want from the next Revenue Assurance Survey?

As we head into the new year and towards the next Revenue Assurance Survey, Rene Felber reflects on the importance of feedback and collaboration.

The Christmas season is over but some things still linger, such as pleasant smells from the traditional Christmas specialities and the peaceful seasonal songs that are still running through my head. Admittedly, I wouldn’t complain if the Christmas lights stayed up for the whole winter season. I wouldn’t even be against being Christmassy all year round!

In the middle of December, we organized a public pre-Christmas family event in our very small municipality, which is located in the Finnish countryside next to a quiet lake. As part of local pre-Christmas traditions, Santa Claus shows up a few times to visit communities. He was scheduled to visit our event as well – the children were excited. However, it turned out that their attention span for Father Christmas was very short. They escaped to go sledging as soon as they received their presents.

We couldn’t understand why they ran away instead of singing a few nice songs with Santa so afterwards, we asked them for their feedback. Their consensus was that Santa’s bag looked like a small handbag and there was nothing useful inside: no toys – “just boring candies”.

We want to better understand your expectations


TM Forum’s Revenue Assurance (RA) survey team defined the purpose of the global RA survey in 2016 as to:
“Share and discuss insights and trends in the revenue assurance discipline and to provide telecom operators and their RA functions with business value improvement paths”.

We shaped the last two surveys in highly collaborative ways, involving about 40 different individuals to plan and realize the surveys. Feedback has generally been positive, but we are not sure how well we met the survey participants’ and report readers’ individual needs.

Digital transformation demands evolution of revenue assurance


We concluded the previous survey with the words, “RA is transforming from a ‘financial revenue watchdog’ to a ‘proactive, cross-functionally operating business assurance discipline’.

Traditional telco operators are rapidly transforming into digital service providers. Complex multi-partner ecosystems make it even more challenging to understand the big picture.

Additionally, market pressures force companies to quickly release minimum viable products (MVPs) which will likely result in process shortcuts. This often leads to insufficient emphasis being placed on back office processes. Non-functioning products, non-compliance with privacy and security requirements and unprofitable behavior may result from the poor control of complexity. There is an obvious need for early involvement of RA in such cycles but successful involvement demands a strategic plan.

Learn from others through collaboration


About a year ago I wrote an article about avoiding change blindness, stating that “an effective assurance practitioner needs to discover and assess relevant change information continuously, rather than waiting for a higher level manager to show up and tell them to do so”.

A successful RA practitioner who wants to proactively help protect the companies’ assets must be able to anticipate the future impact of change. The RA survey team feels a responsibility to support industry change impact evaluation and is committed to providing guidance to the community for adjusting RA strategies and approaches. TM Forum’s RA team propagates collaborative learning instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Do you remember the RA survey 2016 report?


You can download it here.

Top facts:
ra-graphic-1
Focus areas:
ra-focus-areas
Table of contents:
ra-contents

Survey improvements demand your unfiltered feedback


Prior to improving the RA survey product, we want to ask you for feedback. The comedian Ellen DeGeneres once said, “Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others”. We definitely want direct and unfiltered feedback from your perspective just like we asked the kids about Santa. In this way, we invite you to collaboratively help us improve our product. The following example questions will provide some food for thought for your feedback:

  • Considering the RA survey 2016 focus areas and the table of contents (pictured above), what would you add, improve or remove and why?

  • What specific survey insights have supported your team in your journey/ have supported your personal development?

  • What survey facts caught your eye and made you hungry for further exploration?

  • What best practices do you want to learn from RA peers in the product/ service development/ IoT area?

  • What do you see as the major challenges ahead for your RA function?

  • What gaps do you see in the RA vendor solution space to address your pain points?


Please share your feedback with us here or email me or Chris Stock, Director, Security and Privacy Programs, TM Forum.

Collaborative way forward


We established an RA survey leadership team to increase emphasis on collaborative product development. It includes myself as well as Andreas Manolis, BT; Washington Tavares, ISPM; and Luis Rebelo of Wedo. We will review and conclude on the received feedback and plan the new survey during TM Forum Action Week in Lisbon (February 6-10, 2017).

We would be delighted if you joined our community or at least entered into the collaborative spirit by providing us with your valuable, unfiltered feedback.