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More on AT&T Wireless's Bungled System Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "CIO.com has posted a very in-depth article on the recent failings of AT&T Wireless that resulted in the state of the company today. What's fascinating about this article is the sheer amount of accurate information gleaned from former and current employees on the company's bungled attempts to follow FCC mandates on local number portability last November, the inside story on outsourcing efforts, and terrible executive management decisions that ultimately led to its demise. Ironically, the scathing and sometimes highly sarcastic commentary at the end of the article from former employees makes this read even better."
[huge grin] wonder how he got *that* nickname
Seriously, someone who has new/wonderful management process *can* help a company tread a dangerous path, but you *need* the domain expertise to be well-represented in a solution to a technical problem. Imho, at least. From the reports, it seems the process wasn't that wonderful, either
You can expect a certain level of bitterness in ex-employees, especially after a disaster, but there ain't no smoke without fire, and when there's lots of smoke, start looking for the towering inferno...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
For some reason I just cant feel sorry for a company not being able to rally its workers and threaten the workers of off shoring their work. I believe that AWE got exactly what it deserved - number portability was nothing new and they should have been able to get the job done. Yet AWE insisted on moving towards outsourcing instead of figuring out what needed to be done. I have seen similarly situations where no matter how much cheaper labor you look for, if you can't devise the plan, no one will be able to follow it. Good riddance to AWE and I wonder if Cingular is going forward with the outsourcing.
- a young blogger
I had AT&T wireless 5 years ago in college and they were no better then. Bad coverage areas, customer service people without a clue, and screwed up billing.
Say what you like about Verizon's CDMA technology. There is more to a phone company than the technology they choose. If the company can provide robust coverage, provide wireless broadband, and treat me right - they will succeed.
As for the CDMA detractors: Try getting 500k/sec. on ANY GSM system now....Verizon's testing it in DC and NY and will soon roll out nationwide.
AT&T wireless didn't fall apart because of their technology choices...they fell apart because they treated their customers badly.
-ted
I did infer the saboutaging that was probably going on from the article but there were also the comments that were "we told the project managers what didn't work before and what would work and some possibilities to look into and they didn't listen". THAT is arrogance, and regardless of the silos, ignoring advice like this is dooming your project to failure.
[insert witty comment here]
I wonder how many man-years of outsourcing it will take to make back that 100 mil AT&T lost?
I see your point, but I'd like to remind you that $100M is not as much as you think it is. Another proponent of outsourcing - Carly Fiorina of HP - nearly got a $115M bonus deal (to have been shared with Michael Cappelas of Compaq) for the HP-Compaq merger.
My point is that if some companies are prepared to throw money like this at their CEOs, they probably don't really care about losing some customers.
Then again, I could be wrong. In this particular case, AT&T Wireless lost customer goodwill more than money.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Christ! Is this the only view of managers? That all we do is try to cover our own asses, take credit from our workers, and have tiny shrivelled balls when it comes to dealing with our seniors?
While some managers may cover their asses with a consulting firm or the refusal of another department to pay for the firm when a project fails, most will take credit for the failure because it was *their* project. If a consulting firm isn't going to help, they won't recommend it. The reasons that consulting firms are used aren't because they shake up the workers. Its because they take away the tunnel vision that anyone who has worked on a long project faces. Thats it, nothing else. Sure they have smart guys, but they aren't going to finish the project for you by themselves.
"Ironically, the scathing and sometimes highly sarcastic commentary at the end of the article from former employees makes this read even better."
Speak for yourself. This is not good news for me, as I'm a long time AT&T Wireless Services customer. I chose them because they offered the best service, and now they're being bought out by the company I was trying to get away from.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
What ever happened to quality of service? It's dead my friend. As the AT&T CIO put it so clearly "we work to achieve best-in-class margins." Quality be damned, he's going for maximum profit. That attitude is epidemic these days and I blame its existence on the CEO/CIO/C-whatever management model. Their pay and bonuses depend more on happy shareholders than happy customers and when they finish running off all the customers and employees at one place they just move on.
Yes, and HP paid for that fucking bonus by firing 1000's of employees and gutting their R&D staff.
By the time this hurts HP she will be gone and someone else will have to clean up her mess.
I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.
I can think of two reasons.
First, I think there are sufficiently talented and experienced people to implement perhaps 5% of technology projects being built today. There is simply such a high demand and such a low supply of IT professionals that the market is completely off kilter. That's why salaries are so high and the average skill level is so low. The worst part about the high salaries is that they attracted terribly unskilled people who don't care about IT but only care about the money.
Second, the IT field is so freaking complex it defies imagination. There is simply too much to know. So you have these specialists who know only their narrow field, but inevitably those fields go out of fashion and the former specialist joins another field they have no experience in. It's a vicious cycle caused by (I think) the fact that IT isn't truly a mature industry. It's a research field that has been adopted too early by other industries. So there's lots of change which leads to regular retraining and inexperienced workers.
dude, I'm a programmer I work in the IT department of a large bank and i really don't think that most IT work is really that complex. the hardest part of IT work is getting the business people to decide what they want, and keeping what they want the same for the rest of the project. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of stuff in computers that is interesting/hard/whatever, but most IT work can and is done by monkeys.
I like my job, but I don't think most IT work is as complex as you think it is.
Then begins the months of meetings that turn into screaming matches once the emasculated junior management at the company have a scapegoat (the consultants) upon whom to lay the blame for their own impotence. Eventually the consultants figure out who's got the most signing authority for their checks and they start telling those people what they want to hear.
So you can only really half blame the consultants. Every few years they come up with a new little portfolio of tricks to flash around (outsourcing, for example), but your corporate execs still have to sign off on all this stuff. When a company goes down the tubes, you really can't blame anybody but its own senior management.
Yeah, the corporate world sucks, don't it?
Breakfast served all day!
HP used to make extremely well-made products. Then they shifted their focus, from serving customers to serving stockholders. Now they produce garbage. I was in Fry's today and overheard a lady returning a cheap HP printer she had foolishly spent money on. "Their customer support is horrible and they're all from India!" I almost burst out laughing. Sucker! NEVER buy anything from HP. They've been coasting on their name for years and they're slowly grinding to a halt. Soon "HP" will be synonymous with crap and they'll have to change their name to something like "Claria" the way Gator did.
If it weren't for the printer ink racket they're running, they'd have gone under long ago. What a sad end to what used to be a great American company.
When working as a consultant you should never admit you don't know. As one of my bosses once told me, if you seem like you know everything they'll continue to hire you, but if you're honest and ask for help from the place that hired you they'll realize that they don't need you as much as they thought they did.
I'm waiting for a new book along the lines of "The Japan That Can Say No" (sans the jingoism) -- about a new breed of CIO and IT manager that can push back when told to accomplish the impossible within an unrealistic timeframe.
Part of the problem is, I think, the New Success Story psychology. CEOs are so brainwashed into thinking that accomplishing the impossible is what defines you as a successful CEO, that they push their people to do absurdly difficult things in the most miniscume timespans. It's not doing the impossible that's a hallmark of a good CEO, it's doing the possible well and doing the impossible when you HAVE to -- not because it'll win you bragging rights.
(Of course, the whole question of what constitutes a "have to" in this case is probably open-ended.)
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
"Big government" is one of the political cliches I get really tired of. Anything you dislike about what the government does you can conveniently label as "big government". If the government won't let you burn your leaves, and you think that's dumb, it's "big government". But if you care about air pollution, it's government doing it's job. Your necessary program is my "big government".
You're entitled to criticize what the government does (indeed, it's more or less your obligation as a citizen!). But if you hope to actually accomplish anything, try to make your criticisms based on specifics, not vague, subjective terms that mean whatever you chose them to mean.