Software
as a Service is the way to go
'Chorus chooses SaaS tool
for cabinet 'sausage factory' '
August 2008 - ComputerWorld
NZ
 Telcom's
network company, Chorus, has a huge task ahead
of it: deploying and installing 3,600 network
cabinets all around the country, over four
years, to shorten our local loops and boost
national broadband speeds.
To meet that target
it has to build, dispatch and install five
cabinets a day, each day, every day, just in
time. IDC telecommunications analyst Rosalie
Nelson has described the effort as unprecedented
in its scope.
For that reason, it is not a
project Chorus is undertaking on its own: the
company only has around 180 employees. A host
of contractors, partners, consultants and others
are involved, from obtaining resource consents
to commissioning the cabinets. Chorus was building
and deploying cabinets before the major cabinetisation
project got under way. However, this was done
as batch manufacturing.
 To
meet the demands of the new project - and ramp
up from go cabinets a year to 1200 - this had
to be converted to flow manufacturing, where
cabinets are produced, dispatched and installed
in quick sequence. All of the dispersed stakeholders
and contractors to the project need to be provided
with up-to-date information and reporting and
Chorus needs to be able to track progress closely
- in real-time, in fact.
To support that job,
it selected a software as a service (SaaS)
management tool called iToolsonline. Leading
the Chorus effort, as project sponsor, is
fibre-to-the-node (FttN) pro- gramme manager
Ed Beattie and project manager Colin MacDonald.
MacDonald says what was needed was not so
much a project management tool, but a tool
to manage the lifecycle of the project and
the relationships with service providers.
Beattie says there are a lot of inputs into
the project, a lot of suppliers to it and
each of these has milestones to meet. Each
supplier needs access to and the ability
to generate up-to-date information in the
system. "If something happened this
afternoon, we'd know about it this after-
noon," he
says.
iToolsOnline not only tracks activity,
but stores critical project documents that
need to be accessed, such as build and design
documents for cabinets and resource consents.
Beattie says quite a few tools were looked
at during the selection. A key criteria was
simplicity, so the tools would be easy to
teach, intuitive and, given the access requirements,
web-based.
Cost was also a factor. MacDonald
says Chorus spent a long time looking at
its options. Site visits were made to one
other local user, Auckland City Council,
and other user references, at Air New Zealand
and Fonterra, considered. The selection represents
Chorus' first move into Saas. Beattie says
the system produces detailed, but not complex,
reports. Given the high profile of the fibre-to-the-node
project, and the requirement to report to
Telecom CEO Paul Reynolds, that was essential.
MacDonald adds that the system provides a
powerful management dashboard for snapshot
project overviews. This includes traffic-light
warnings to help manage risk areas. The
iToolsOnline system appears likely to live
on at Chorus well beyond the end of the FttN
project. The company is now integrating its
other network building activities into the
Saas tool.
Courtesy of COMPUTERWORLD
NZ
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