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More on AT&T Wireless's Bungled System Upgrade

Posted by michael on from the sweet-creamy-justice dept.

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."

10 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. I'm using AT&T Wireless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Including wireless internet access to write this on Slashdot, and I've had no pro

  2. AWE did it to themselves by stecoop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:AWE did it to themselves by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      AT&T has had really bad executives and really bad leadership. When Ma Bell was broken up the current CEOs showed great ineptitude by capitulating to MCI and Bill McGowan. Whereas IBM and Microsoft have shown that you can fight Antitrust cases and settle them on your own terms Ma Bell capitulated and decided to split up on bad terms. This was the first example of bad leadership.


      AT&T bought a stake in Sun Microsystems. After which Sun mysteriously changed religions from BSD to System or SunOS to beastly Solaris.


      Robert Allen is bad executive number two. In 1991 AT&T under Robert Allen decided to buy NCR for $7.5 billion NCR and renamed it as AT&T GIS. AT&T also sold of Unix System Labs to Novell.
      NCR was later spun off at a loss of billions due to the inability to manage it. It came down to management.



      Michael Armstrong is another bad CEO. Under Armstrong TCI was purchased and so was Media one.
      Armstrong spent 100 billion buying different companies. One mistake was getting into a bidding war over Media One. Another gaffe was Excit@Home whereas Timewarner had roadrunner Excite@Home was allowed to fail under AT&Ts watch.


      After merging the company decided to demerge and spin off AT&T wireless and AT&T broadband. A stake was sold to NTT Docomo in AT&T wireless. The paradox is why would you spend billions of dollars to buy companies and then decide your corporate strategy is wrong and spin off the companies?


      AT&T wireless was a big mess. NTT Docomo purchased a stake in AT&T with strings attached. AT&T Wireless was pushed to used Docomos version of GSM e-mode. They also erred in switching wireless protocols from TDMA to GSM instead of CDMA. CDMA is better and more established in the US. Sprint activelly promotes their version of CDMA as better than AT&Ts GSM. The migration to GSM was very complex and had lots of glitches. However, when they brought in NTT Docomo as a stockholder it went with GSM. It isn't just GSM it's a variant of NTT's. NTT Docomo wouldn't even bid for AT&T wireless afterward.



      AT&T also erred in spinning off AT&T wireless as a tracking stock (A mistake Sprint has soon learned) and hiring Michael Armstrong as CEO. The company basically gave away 40 billion dollars in value including the Cable and Wireless divisions (speaking of which is another misnomer for a badly managed company). Jack Welch the CEO of GE felt that spinoffs were bad and spinoffs just spinoff cash and assets to shareholders with vary little return for the parent. It proves the old adage that your only as good as the leader. A very bad leader can destroy a company as can be seen at MCI err MCI-Worldcom.

  3. We Geeks Are Humans Too! by osewa77 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Meanwhile, rumors of layoffs and offshore outsourcing began swirling around Odyssey. "[The rumors] slowed things down," says a former employee. "When stuff like that happens, people start looking for other work. I know I was looking for other work when I should have been testing."
    It is a basic fact that most people need to be happy, content, secure to produce great work. It is another basic fact that managers will never stop lookiing for ways around that 'limitation'!
    - a young blogger
    1. Re:We Geeks Are Humans Too! by gurustu · · Score: 5, Insightful
      To be fair, not all managers are like this. Some managers do their best to create bubbles of sanity and stability, to allow their teams to do the very best work possible. The best of managers will recognize that the largest part of their job is to be a drama sponge ... absorb the drama radiating down, dampen the drama radiating up, and shield their team to let them get work done.

      However, what can a manager do when a project or organization starts to underperform? Too frequently, managers will attempt to improve performance by "shaking things up". They think "Okay, after one more reorganization, then things will be right." or "Well, if we put this process into place, it will be perfect."

      The problem is really that management is as much an art as writing code or designing systems. There are a lot of people out there who can do it when the problems are normal, when the future is well understood. Unfortunately, most of them respond in counterproductive ways when confronted with crisis and uncertainty.

      In short (too late!), it isn't that managers look for ways to stop people from being "happy, content, secure" out of spite. It's just that they're trying to do something, anything to make things better. They flail, and things get worse.

  4. Siebel strikes again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Siebel is horrible and this isnt the only company that this has happened too.

    Take a look at Telus Communications.. When they implemented a Siebel based system customer complains skyrocketed.. The system was unstable and basically useless.. You couldent get any information to people on what was happening..

    Papers had a field day on how much customer service sucked.

    God have mercy on anyone who has to implement Siebel 7 in a large enterprise enviroment.

  5. Big 5 consultants by BigHungryJoe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As the go-live date neared, former employees say that Deloitte and Touche project managers relaxed testing requirements for various pieces of the system.

    The Big 5 (or however many there are now - I mean Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse, Deloitte & Touche, etc) charge hundreds of dollars an hour for "experts" that aren't experts at all. They're usually just one page ahead of the client. They even charge over $100/hr for wet-behind-the-ears college grads.

    We've all dealt with them before, they are usually intelligent people but have no expertise or experience in the task they are being paid to complete.

    Yet again and again, despite all their failings, they are being hired by big corporations for major projects.

    I'd like to know why.

  6. AT&T Wireless didn't just execute poorly... by John+Murdoch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While this is a sad story--especially about the poor guys with Indian "consultants" following them around asking a zillion questions about how to do their jobs--it's worthwhile to remember where the article appears: CIO magazine. CIO is focused on the needs/wants/interests of the guys in ties in a corporate IT environment--and in general a lot of CIOs think that outsourcing/offshoring is a hell of a good idea. The general tone of this article is "look at how these yobbos bungled the implementation of Siebel CRM." What they didn't mention at all is, "look at how these geniuses totally misunderstood their business, and pissed away roughly $40 billion in stock capitalization in just three years. And therefore died the death that they so richly deserved."

    It's the technology, stupid...
    There are companies, even in the 21st century, that can ignore cutting-edge technology. You don't need to be e-commerce enabled to be a plumber. But if you're in the wireless telephony business, in the midst of a headlong rush into a blizzard of new technologies, the core focus of your business isn't marketing or sales or re-carpeting the executive suite. Your core focus MUST be on the technology--and as soon as you lose sight of that focus, your competitors will consume you.

    And these geniuses decided to offshore 3,000 jobs. And were doubtless shocked--shocked, I tell you!--to hear that employee morale about the developers was down.

    I'm no techno-protectionist
    I remember discussing the inevitable introduction of competition from overseas back in the late 1980s, and debating the possibility endlessly while working in Japan in the mid-90s. There will be companies that decide that, in their businesses, in their business models, IT work is a cost, not an investment. They will decide that they want to minimize that cost. They will focus on maintaining existing systems (with marginal, incremental improvements) and eschew major new developments. They will find that that approach may make it feasible to hire developers in the Third World. But those businesses that do so are making a conscious, deliberate decision: we're not going to focus the company on technology. We're going to try to minimize the company's dependence on technology. IT is a cost--it does not contribute to revenue.

    For a wireless telephone company to take this position is simply insane: they are in the technology business. They are smack in the middle of a global technology race--one of the few technology races with competitors from practically every part of the northern hemisphere. They need to be faster to market with new products; the new products must be faster, better, more efficient, and more effective; and they have to have a world-beating customer service experience. Instead of fleeing from technology, they should be driven by it. They should be absolutely focused on it. They should be actively recruiting talent to build their strengths....

    Because that's what every other company that's focused on technology is doing. Subcontracting out your technology--in a technology business--is sort of like farming, but buying all your crops at the supermarket.

    I am not a lawyer...
    But I am an engineering team leader at a U.S. electronics company that leads the world in our industry: lighting controls. We export electrical and electronic equipment to countries around the world--including Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, and every country in Europe--because we focus on five core principles. And Principle #4 is "Innovate with high-quality products." In other words, we're in the technology business, so we focus--relentlessly--on the technology.

    Once upon a time, AT&T did too...
    AT&T Wireless was spun off from AT&T--but the corporate heritage is obviously there. And AT&T, once upon a time, ruled the world--literally chan

  7. CIO deserves to be fired by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am the CTO for a large enterprise software company (>$1B).

    I spend about 30% of my time in front of the IT departments of the largest companies in the world, all of which are household names. They almost all tell me two things about our software:

    1. It is heavily modified (they all have source)
    2. They wish it was not

    The fact is that these large customization projects, particularly ones which involve the Big 5, are over budget and late by factors that would boggle the minds of most mortals. It is not uncommon for these companies to spend >$100M for a software upgrade ON A SINGLE SITE. These companies have hundreds of sites.

    As a contrast, another $9B electronics company I met with a few weeks ago can install a complete factory, including financials, manufacturing, logistics, scheduling, human resources, and reporting, all in less than 6 weeks. They have done it over 100 times. How do they do it? They have the entire cookie-cutter system burned on a DVD. Literally no customization is allowed at the plant level.

    The only way to be successful at these kind of projects is to use an axe, not a scalpel. AT&T Wireless tried to use a scalpel. They should have thrown out all that junk and started over.

    I would also point out that if you read the CIO's biography, he is an advisor to HP. Notice that they also chose HP as their outsourcing partner!

    Can you say "conflict of interest"?

  8. Re:The Continuing Saga of the Death of Ma Bell by fatman22 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.