GadiS:
Who will admit not using the list?!!
....
(am I over optimistic?)!!
Gadi
We need optimists as well as pessimists, so I hope you are right. In fact, I have been known to be so pessimistic that other people lose the will to continue and just give up, which is certainly not my ambition here. On the other hand, I once gave a presentation on why you need to be a pessimist to work in revenue assurance; when others assume everything is working okay, you keep looking to see what has gone wrong!
I guess my pessimism relates to how we manage the transition from where we are (list version 1.0) to where we want to be (de facto standard). For a standard to work everyone has to want to follow the same one. The best way to mess up the chances of a standard succeeding are to issue a rival standard. Telecoms has plenty of examples that proove that point. Rival standards are a barrier to collaboration and they waste energy as the rival camps design their own separate solutions to the same problem. And after each camp has its own solution they end up competing for followers or putting even more energy into merging the standards. In the worst case scenario you end up with so many standards that there is little value in following any of them. My worry is that if people do not sign up to this standard before it is the "de facto" standard then it never will be the de facto standard - and the vacuum will be filled by lots of rival standards claiming to be the same or better than ours, but in reality being just inferior copies designed to promote the strengths and ignore the weaknesses of whoever comes up with the rival standard.
The funny thing is that I can give a great example of exactly this thing happening to another standard we are working on - and you, Gadi, are right in the middle of it! Take a look at the following article in Billing World & OSS Today: http://www.billingworld.com/rev2/main/featureArticle.cfm?featureID=7780 which quotes you. Fine, it covers the basics of a maturity model and is good publicity for our work - but look at the headline:
"Revenue Assurance Maturity Models (RAMMs) are abundant today"
How did that happen? Less than 3 years ago, when we first met in California, nobody was talking about Revenue Assurance Maturity Models - never mind coming up with a acronym for them or claiming they are abundant. I proposed it as a half-complete idea at the TAW on the back of an internal exercise we had been performing at T-Mobile, and I remember at least some of the people in the room thought it was a bad idea. But today, you find the words being repeated by many people working in revenue assurance, but hardly any of them are talking not about some common industry-agreed model. Instead, they are presented by people talking about their own ideas, without any attempt to build consensus or support for their pet theories, without seeking any evidence or experience to corroborate their findings outside of their own organization. So, the article is right that maturity models are abundant. What the article does not say is that most of them are complete crap. I have yet to see a rival model that is a genuine attempt at cross-industry collaboration. Most plainly steal from the work the TMF has done, but change it to avoid the obvious intellectual property implications. None of the rivals admit that their work is the product of solely in-house experience, and hence inferior to our cross-industry exercise. But you can be sure of one thing: some of the people who would otherwise have found our maturity model and be working with it and helping us to improve it will have been distracted by the rival models first.
The worst thing is that our maturity model really needs a lot of work still, and 3 years later we are still working on it. But it is a brave man that would hold up our model, say out loud that it still needs a lot of work, and encourage people to work with us on using it in practice and improving it, when the next guy talking claims his model is the finished article and he has some nice consultants in good suits just waiting to come to your business and help you use it - for a reasonable price.
So, I want to avoid complacency. Our standards, including the loss checklist and the maturity model, will not become the de facto standards just because they are good or genuine or we believe in them or even because the rivals are crap. We also need effective promotion. Without a budget to promote them, that promotion has to be viral in nature: people need to openly state they use it and recommend it to others just because they do use it and they think it works, even if there is no direct financial benefit to them. I want to use this portal, and any other activities that the team can suggest, to drive that viral promotion of our work. So, coming back to the original question: how do we get consultants, vendors and practitioners to praise and recommend our checklist before anyone can seriously claim it is the de facto stanadard? Put another way, if we start with one vendor - maybe one like cVidya ;) - one consulting firm - maybe like E&Y - and one service provider - maybe like Telstra, what can we ask them to do to promote our checklist? What might be a good win-win for both the TMF and them? And what will they do to actually promote our standard on a regular basis? Put another way, suppose a nice vendor - like cVidya ;) - has a website with links to articles - like our story about the abundance of maturity models ;) - how do we get them to link to or talk about our maturity model as being the one they advise their customers to use? How do we get them to sell their services as being one mechanism to tackle some of the items on our checklist?