At a Tier 1 Telecoms company as a solution designer I was assigned to a project (that had already started) to introduce a new business intelligence and data-warehouse platform for statistical data analysis and reporting, where the solution had already been chosen

• My manager gave me the project as my first assignment at the firm to lessen his workload, so I had to quickly understand the project and its aims.
• The relatively small project had an approved budget of £200,000
• The aim was to replace the manual collation of data from various sources which would then be pasted into spread sheets and then emailed to the subscribed wholesale customers, with an automated web-based system with a dynamic data warehouse and web-based reporting engine, with secure multi-tenant access.
. The desired COTS solution had already been decided as it was said the company had a corporate license for it, which would have meant zero project costs for the software and maintenance.

• My first action in understanding the requirements and driving the project forward was to qualify the choice of the specified solution: I knew it was a COTS solution that was relatively complex and expensive (licenses and maintenance) and I wanted to validate the decisions before building a solution around it for due diligence.
• I was told that the company had a license for business objects by a senior stakeholder. I understood this as a valid reason, but I persisted in seeking validation of the actual license for the project.
• After checking with the programme and other business units, it transpired that the company did not have a license, which then meant there was no business reason to choose this option as a solution (and the projects budget would have had to at least double)
• I then set about researching and proposing alternative solutions that met the requirements and budget.
• As the requirements were simple and all solutions were an option, I championed open-source solutions for their customisability, code ownership and cost efficiency (as we had skills in-house to customise the code)
• I set-up a demonstration with our supplier whom had configured 3 applications to do the same thing so that we could compare them, along with comparable cost & effort data.

• The project stake-holders unanimously voted for one of the solutions which was OpenSource which was a first for this large company.
• The choice of an OpenSource solution meant lower purchase and support costs, which translated to 25% project budget saving, and year-on-year CAPEX savings.

• Qualitative Research
• Business Case
• Design Thinking
• business analysis
• Report Design
• requirement analysis
• solution design

• BI & Analytics
• Digital Enablement
• Process Effectiveness & Automation

• Telecommunications