CAPÍTULO III. DISEÑO DE LA PROPUESTA
III.1 METODOLOGÍA PARA EL DESARROLLO DE LAS ACCIONES LÚDICAS
Part of the wider Liberty Global Inc. cable group that has operations in 13 countries worldwide, UPC
Netherlands is the second largest cable TV operator in the Netherlands. It has 3.7 million subscriptions to
its digital and analog video, broadband, and digital telephony (VoIP) services across 1.8 million customers
as of June 30, 2012. The company’s customers are located across six regional clusters, including the
Netherlands’ two largest cities, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. All its networks have been upgraded to
having two-way capability, and almost all of the households it provides cable to are served by a network
with bandwidth of at least 860MHz and speeds up to 120Mbps.
In 2010 the company decided to complement its vertical, ‘siloed’ operational management structure with a horizontal structure that would provide overall oversight, governance and control of the interactions of these departments. It established a new team in 2011 to usher in the profound changes to the company’s operations and structure that were based around end-to-end processes which involved customers and program management. They were developed using TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM). The resultant new approach to governance gave a senior executive ownership of processes from end-to-end to achieve better control, greater effectiveness in a dynamic business environment and improve service to customers.
UPC Netherlands is the second largest cable operator in the Netherlands, with 3.7 million subscriptions to its digital and analog cable video, broadband and digital telephony (VoIP) services from its 1.8 million customers as of June 30, 2012. Breaking this down, the company has 1.8 million video subscribers, of whom 1.1 million are also digital cable subscribers consuming services including digital video
recording, high definition and video-on-demand. It has 1 million broadband customers, offering speeds up to 120Mbps, and 902,000 telephony subscribers. The company’s 2011/2012 revenues were $1.2 billion.
Due to considerable growth, increased digitization and convergence of its services, the company recognized that it needed to improve its processes and control of the processes to grow to the next level. This was not only to support new products and services, but also to offer its customer a better experience. Among other innovations, UPC Netherlands was the first European company to roll out DOCSIS 3.0 to gain competitive advantage, but faced a ‘disconnect’ between governance of its operations and changes to them.
In 2011, the company set up a new team to streamline and gain end-to-end control of customer and program management processes. UPC’s legacy internal operational management
structure was siloed, which meant that although different departments could and did work together, there was no overarching ownership structure that dealt with the interactions and interconnections between them. In particular, there was no overall view of the operational processes which flowed through different departments.
This made it difficult to obtain a proper overview of any inefficiencies in the process chain, or identify where improvements could be made, and there was no end-to- end control mechanism in place for those processes. The company also recognized that the controls governing how individuals change operational processes could be optimized. Without overall oversight, a change in one department could have unintended consequences for another, or even adverse consequences for the customers’ experience.
A project to improve process control and management was initiated, as part of a move towards being able to make changes that could deliver benefits across the whole process chain.
Better business processes
UPC Netherlands’ new, process-oriented governance system was built from the ground up, starting with an inventory of processes regarding customers and program management. In all, the company defined 18 core business processes which directly or indirectly affect customers, creating an initial inventory of processes, work instructions and documents which ran to about 1,000 files. Moreover, the company identified an even larger number of activities that were executed, but without being standardized or documented.
Items in the inventory were grouped into logical clusters of responsibilities using TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), part of the Frameworx suite of standards- based tools and best practices (see page 6). Using this Framework helped the company map of the documents into different functional areas, which in turn it arranged in logical areas of responsibilities.
bUSinESS
The new governance framework included an overarching change management structure to accommodate the new responsibilities that would arise from introducing new products and services. Similarly, it had to be able to deal with responsibilities moving from one area to another after any organizational changes. At each stage, the changes were synchronized with the Business Process Framework.UPC Netherlands complemented its management structure to reflect this new process-oriented approach, assigning responsibility for each business process to an operational director, who manages the process from end-to-end, rather than basing the structure around departmental hierarchy. The IT change management structure was also amended to support the new management model. Previously change management was driven by a business need from a particular team, then the IT team was tasked with building it. Once completed, the process or function was typically automated and run autonomously, without clear operational ownership as of go-live.
Now if IT builds an automated solution, the team concerned uses it to run a process and whoever requested each change must designate someone to be responsible for the end result. As changes to systems and changes to processes are managed in an integrated way, the information model built using the Business Process Framework is continually updated. The end-to-end process owners are at Vice President or Director level, whereas the owners of sub-processes are mostly manager-level staff.
High scores
Departmental teams are still getting used to working in this more horizontal way and the mapped processes are becoming more meaningful to the business. For instance, teams are working out which are the most important performance indicators for each process, and which projects and problem- solving initiatives contribute most to those performance indicators. The Business Process Framework prioritizes activities so that the company can optimize customer experience across the whole chain, rather than just in one department.
Overall, UPC Netherland now has more control of its processes and so can make entire processes more efficient rather than decisions only affecting part of the chain or possibly creating conflict with another department’s goal(s) and even undermining customer experience.
The company has defined and established ownership of processes, so it is clear who is responsible for which part of the operational chain which directly or indirectly touches the customer.
UPC Netherlands keeps a revolving scorecard of around 50 items to track and monitor the key initiatives resulting from the new way of working. These scorecards are used to establish whether initiatives increase revenue, reduce costs, improve
problem solving, provide customer experience, or combinations of these. In all cases the outputs have been very positive. There has also been a much faster through-put for projects and solving problems due to individuals having responsibilities and the corresponding mandate to act right across the chain.
The future
The company is investigating rolling out this way of working into other areas, for example, integrating product and platform changes into the new change management structure to further support convergence. For example, to set up a dedicated process work stream within each key program to involve the future process owners earlier in the design and implementation process. It is also working to introduce a problem management structure based on the ownership model, as well as
investigating the possibility of introducing program budgets based on customer processes rather than departments.
It is also possible that the lessons learned by UPC in the Netherlands will be applied the group’s other European operations: indeed the Liberty Global group already deploys Frameworx widely, particularly where the group’s IT and architecture development is supported as a centralized activity. In addition, UPC Netherlands plans to put what it has learned to another good use – collaborating with TM Forum through the Cable Initiative to contribute to the continuing development of the Business Process Framework for the cable industry (see pages 20 and 21).
Prioritizing for the greater good
Prioritization is another important area of improvement resulting from the implementation of UPC Netherlands’ process-oriented governance system. As well as clarity in terms of what needs be changed and who will be involved to make the change effective, it’s now easier for the company to determine where its priorities are, the positive or negative impacts of changes, and to balance the advantages and disadvantages.
With the old management structure, potentially a change by one department caused problems for another – the waterbed effect. The goal for the Average Handling Time (AHT) of a customer service team may for example lead to additional truck rolls or box swaps.
By contrast, the new system pulls together all the interests across the board, and determines what is best for the full service chain and the customer. To continue with the made-up example above, analysis would perhaps suggest a better outcome could be achieved by a
temporary reduction in customer care tooling and a re- allocation of resources to more preventative maintenance on the network to avoid the complaints in the first place.