The ‘Agile Operator’: 5 Key Ways to Meet the Agility Challenge

Understanding Agility

What does ‘Agility’ mean? 

A number of business strategies and industries spring to mind when considering the term ‘agility’ but the telecoms industry is not front and centre… 

Agility describes the ability to change direction and move at speed, whilst maintaining control and balance. This innate flexibility and adaptability aptly describes an athlete, a boxer or a cheetah, yet this description can be (and is) readily applied in a business context. Whilst the telecoms industry is not usually referenced as a model of agility (and is often described as the opposite), a number of business strategies and industries have adopted more ‘agile’ approaches, attempting to simultaneously reduce inefficiencies, maximise the deployment of resources, learn though testing and stimulate innovation. It is worthwhile recapping some of the key ‘agile’ approaches as they inform our and the interviewees’ vision of agility for the telecoms operator.

When introduced, these approaches have helped redefine their respective industries. One of the first business strategies that popularised a more ‘agile’ approach was the infamous ‘lean-production’ and related ‘just-in-time’ methodologies, principally developed by Toyota in the mid-1900s. Toyota placed their focus on reducing waste and streamlining the production process with the mindset of “only what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed,” reshaping the manufacturing industry.

The methodology that perhaps springs to many people’s minds when they hear the word agility is ‘agile software development’. This methodology relies on iterative cycles of rapid prototyping followed by customer validation with increasing cross-functional involvement to develop software products that are tested, evolved and improved repeatedly throughout the development process. This iterative and continuous improvement directly contrasts the waterfall development model where a scripted user acceptance testing phase typically occurs towards the end of the process. The agile approach to development speeds up the process and results in software that meets the end users’ needs more effectively due to continual testing throughout the process.

Figure 5: Agile Software Development

Source: Marinertek.com

More recently the ‘lean startup’ methodology has become increasingly popular as an innovation strategy. Similarly to agile development, this methodology also focuses on iterative testing (replacing the testing of software with business-hypotheses and new products). Through iterative testing and learning a startup is able to better understand and meet the needs of its users or customers, reducing the inherent risk of failure whilst keeping the required investment to a minimum. The success of high-tech startups has popularised this approach; however the key principles and lessons are not solely applicable to startups but also to established companies.

Despite the fact that (most of) these methodologies or philosophies have existed for a long time, they have not been adopted consistently across all industries. The digital or internet industry was built on these ‘agile’ principles, whereas the telecoms industry has sought to emulate this by adopting agile models and methods. Of course these two industries differ in nature and there will inevitably be constraints that affect the ability to be agile across different industries (e.g. the long planning and investment cycles required to build network infrastructure) yet these principles can broadly be applied more universally, underwriting a more effective way of working.

This report highlights the benefits and challenges of becoming more ‘agile’ and sets out the operator’s perspective of ‘agility’ across a number of key domains. This vision of the ‘Agile Operator’ was captured through 29 interviews with senior telecoms executives and is supplemented by STL analysis and research.

Barriers to (telco) agility 

…The telecoms industry is hindered by legacy systems, rigid organisational structures and cultural issues…

It is well known that the telecoms industry is hampered by legacy systems; systems that may have been originally deployed between 5-20 years ago are functionally limited. Coordinating across these legacy systems impedes a telco’s ability to innovate and customise product offerings or to obtain a complete view of customers. In addition to legacy system challenges, interview participants outlined a number of other key barriers to becoming more agile. Three principle barriers emerged:

  1. Legacy systems
  2. Mindset & Culture
  3. Organisational Structure & Internal Processes

Legacy Systems 

One of the main (and often voiced by interviewees) barriers to achieving greater agility are legacy systems. Dealing with legacy IT systems and technology can be very cumbersome and time-consuming as typically they are not built to be further developed in an agile way. Even seemingly simple change requests end in development queues that stretch out many months (often years). Therefore operators remain locked-in to the same, limited core capabilities and options, which in turn stymies innovation and agility. 

The inability to modify a process, a pricing plan or to easily on/off-board a 3rd-party product has significant ramifications for how agile a company can be. It can directly limit innovation within the product development process and indirectly diminish employees’ appetite for innovation.

It is often the case that operators are forced to find ‘workarounds’ to launch new products and services. These workarounds can be practical and innovative, yet they are often crude manipulations of the existing capabilities. They are therefore limited in terms what they can do and in terms of the information that can be captured for reporting and learning for new product development. They may also create additional technical challenges when trying to migrate the ‘workaround’ product or service to a new system. 

Figure 6: What’s Stopping Telco Agility?

Source: STL Partners

Mindset & Culture

The historic (incumbent) telco culture, born out of public sector ownership, is the opposite of an ‘agile’ mindset. It is one that put in place rigid controls and structure, repealed accountability and stymied enthusiasm for innovation – the model was built to maintain and scale the status quo. For a long time the industry invested in the technology and capabilities aligned to this approach, with notable success. As technology advanced (e.g. ever-improving feature phones and mobile data) this approach served telcos well, enhancing their offerings which in turn further entrenched this mindset and culture. However as technology has advanced even further (e.g. the internet, smartphones), this focus on proven development models has resulted in telcos becoming slow to address key opportunities in the digital and mobile internet ecosystems. They now face a marketplace of thriving competition, constant disruption and rapid technological advancement. 

This classic telco mindset is also one that emphasized “technical” product development and specifications rather than the user experience. It was (and still is) commonplace for telcos to invest heavily upfront in the creation of relatively untested products and services and then to let the product run its course, rather than alter and improve the product throughout its life.

Whilst this mindset has changed or is changing across the industry, interviewees felt that the mindset and culture has still not moved far enough. Indeed many respondents indicated that this was still the main barrier to agility. Generally they felt that telcos did not operate with a mindset that was conducive to agile practices and this contributed to their inability to compete effectively against the internet players and to provide the levels of service that customers are beginning to expect. 

Organisational Structure & Internal Processes

Organisational structure and internal processes are closely linked to the overall culture and mindset of an organisation and hence it is no surprise that interviewees also noted this aspect as a key barrier to agility. Interviewees felt that the typical (functionally-orientated) organisational structure hinders their companies’ ability to be agile: there is a team for sales, a team for marketing, a team for product development, a network team, a billing team, a provisioning team, an IT team, a customer care team, a legal team, a security team, a privacy team, several compliance teams etc.. This functional set-up, whilst useful for ramping-up and managing an established product, clearly hinders a more agile approach to developing new products and services through understanding customer needs and testing adoption/behaviour. With this set-up, no-one in particular has a full overview of the whole process and they are therefore not able to understand the different dimensions, constraints, usage and experience of the product/service. 

Furthermore, having these discrete teams makes it hard to collaborate efficiently – each team’s focus is to complete their own tasks, not to work collaboratively. Indeed some of the interviewees blamed the organisational structure for creating a layer of ‘middle management’ that does not have a clear understanding of the commercial pressures facing the organisation, a route to address potential opportunities nor an incentive to work outside their teams. This leads to teams working in silos and to a lack of information sharing across the organisation.

A rigid mindset begets a rigid organisational structure which in turn leads to the entrenchment of inflexible internal processes. Interviewees saw internal processes as a key barrier, indicating that within their organisation and across the industry in general internal decision-making is too slow and bureaucratic.

 

Interviewees noted that there were too many checks and processes to go through when making decisions and often new ideas or opportunities fell outside the scope of priority activities. Interviewees highlighted project management planning as an example of the lack of agility; most telcos operate against 1-2 year project plans (with associated budgeting). Typically the budget is locked in for the year (or longer), preventing the re-allocation of financing towards an opportunity that arises during this period. This inflexibility prevents telcos from quickly capitalising on potential opportunities and from (re-)allocating resources more efficiently.

  • Executive Summary
  • Understanding Agility
  • What does ‘Agility’ mean?
  • Barriers to (telco) agility
  • “Agility” is an aspiration that resonates with operators
  • Where is it important to be agile?
  • The Telco Agility Framework
  • Organisational Agility
  • The Agile Organisation
  • Recommended Actions: Becoming the ‘Agile’ Organisation
  • Network Agility
  • A Flexible & Scalable Virtualised Network
  • Recommended Actions: The Journey to the ‘Agile Network’
  • Service Agility
  • Fast & Reactive New Service Creation & Modification
  • Recommended Actions: Developing More-relevant Services at Faster Timescales
  • Customer Agility
  • Understand and Make it Easy for your Customers
  • Recommended Actions: Understand your Customers and Empower them to Manage & Customise their Own Service
  • Partnering Agility
  • Open and Ready for Partnering
  • Recommended Actions: Become an Effective Partner
  • Conclusion

 

  • Figure 1: Regional & Functional Breakdown of Interviewees
  • Figure 2: The Barriers to Telco Agility
  • Figure 3: The Telco Agility Framework
  • Figure 4: The Agile Organisation
  • Figure 5: Agile Software Development
  • Figure 6: What’s Stopping Telco Agility?
  • Figure 7: The Importance of Agility
  • Figure 8: The Drivers & Barriers of Agility
  • Figure 9: The Telco Agility Framework
  • Figure 10: The Agile Organisation
  • Figure 11: Organisational Structure: Functional vs. Customer-Segmented
  • Figure 12: How Google Works – Small, Open Teams
  • Figure 13: How Google Works – Failing Well
  • Figure 14: NFV managed by SDN
  • Figure 15: Using Big Data Analytics to Predictively Cache Content
  • Figure 16: Three Steps to Network Agility
  • Figure 17: Launch with the Minimum Viable Proposition – Gmail
  • Figure 18: The Key Components of Customer Agility
  • Figure 19: Using Network Analytics to Prioritise High Value Applications
  • Figure 20: Knowing When to Partner
  • Figure 21: The Telco Agility Framework

Valuing Digital: A Contentious Yet Vital Business

Introduction

Tech VC in 2014: New heights, billion-dollar valuations

Venture capital investment across the mobile, digital and broader technology sectors is soaring. Although it stumbled during the 2008/9 financial crisis, the ecosystem has since recovered with 2013 and 2014 proving to be record-breaking years. Looking at Silicon Valley, for example, 2013 saw deals and funding more than double compared to 2009, and 2014 had already surpassed 2013 by the half-year mark:

Figure 1: Silicon Valley Tech Financing History, 2009-14

 

Source: CB Insights Venture Capital Database

As Figure 1 shows, growth in funding has outstripped growth in the number of deals: consequently, the average deal size has more than doubled since 2009. In part, this has been driven by a small number of large deals attracting very high valuations, with some of the highest valuations seen by Uber ($41bn), SpaceX ($12bn), Dropbox ($10bn), Snapchat ($10-20bn) and Airbnb ($13bn). Similarly high valuations have been seen in Silicon Valley tech exits, with Facebook’s $19bn acquisition of WhatsApp and Google’s $3.2bn acquisition of Nest two high-profile examples. These billion-dollar valuations are leading many to claim that a dotcom-esque bubble is forming: what can possibly justify such valuations?

In some cases, these concerns are driven by a lack of publicly available information on financial performance: for example, Uber’s leaked dashboard showed its financials to be considerably stronger than analysts’ expectations at the time. In other cases, they appear to be driven by a lack of understanding of the true rationale behind the deal. See, for example, the Connected Home: Telcos vs Google (Nest, Apple, Samsung, +…) and Facebook + WhatsApp + Voice: So What? Executive Briefings.

The Telco Dilemma: What is it all worth?

Against this uncertain backdrop, telecoms operators are expanding into such new mobile and digital services as a means to fill the ‘hunger gap’ left by falling revenues from core services. They are doing so through a mixture of organic and inorganic investment, in different verticals and with varying levels of ambition and success:

Figure 2: % of Revenue from ‘New’ Telco 2.0 Services*, 2013

 

Source: Telco 2.0 Transformation Index
* Disclaimer: Scope of what is included/excluded varies slightly by operator and depends upon the ability to source reliable data
Note: Vodafone data from 2012/13 financial year 

However, this is a comparatively new area for telcos and many are now asking what is the real ‘value’ of their individual digital initiatives. For example, to what extent are Telefonica’s digital activities leading to a material uplift in enterprise value?

This question is further complicated by the potential for a new service to generate ‘synergy value’ for the acquirer or parent company: just as Google’s $3.2bn+ valuation of Nest was in part driven by the synergy Nest’s sensor data provides to Google’s core advertising business, digital services have also been shown to provide synergy benefits to telcos’ core communications businesses. For example, MTN Mobile Money in Uganda is estimated to have seen up to 48% of its gross profit contribution generated by synergies, such as core churn reduction and airtime distribution savings, as opposed to standard transaction commissions.

Ultimately, without understanding the value of their digital businesses and how this changes over time (capital gain), telcos cannot effectively govern their digital activities. Prioritisation, budget allocation and knowing when to close initiatives (‘fast failure’) within digital is challenging without a clear idea of the return on investment different verticals and initiatives are generating. Understanding valuation was therefore identified as the joint most important success factor for delivering digital services in STL Partners’ recent survey of telco executives:

Figure 3: Importance of factors in successfully delivering digital services (out of 4)

 

Source: Digital Transformation and Ambition Survey Results, 2014, n=55

Crucially, however, survey respondents also identified developing this understanding as more than two years away from being resolved. In order to accelerate this process, there are three key questions which need to be addressed:

  1. What are the pitfalls to avoid when valuing digital businesses within telecoms operators?
  2. How should telcos model the spin-off value of their digital businesses?
  3. How should telcos think about the ‘synergy value’ generated by their digital businesses?

This Executive Briefing (Part 1) focuses on question 1; questions 2 and 3 will be addressed by future research (Part 2).

 

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • Tech VC in 2014: New heights, billion-dollar valuations
  • The Telco Dilemma: What is it all worth?
  • Challenges in Valuing Any Business (Analog or Digital)
  • DCF: Theoretically sound, but less reliable in practice
  • All models are wrong, but some are more useful than others
  • DCF’s shortcomings are magnified with digital businesses
  • Practical Issues: Lessons from Uber, Google, Skype and Spotify
  • A Conceptual Issue: Lessons from Facebook
  • Proxy Models: An improvement on DCF?
  • The Synergy Problem: A challenge for any valuation technique
  • Synergies are Real: Case studies from mobile money, cloud services and the connected home
  • Synergies are Problematic: Challenges for valuation in four areas
  • Conclusions
  • STL Partners and Telco 2.0: Change the Game

 

  • Figure 1: Silicon Valley Tech Financing History, 2009-14
  • Figure 2: % of Revenue from ‘New’ Telco 2.0 Services, 2013
  • Figure 3: Importance of factors in successfully delivering digital services (out of 4)
  • Figure 4: Sensitivity of DCF valuation to assumptions on free cash flow growth
  • Figure 5: Different buyer/seller valuations support a range of potential sales prices
  • Figure 6: Impact of addressable market and market share on Uber’s DCF valuation
  • Figure 7: Facebook vs. yield businesses, EV/revenue multiple, 2014
  • Figure 8: Facebook monthly active users vs. valuation, Q1 2010-Present
  • Figure 9: Three potential investor approaches to modelling Facebook’s value
  • Figure 10: MTN Mobile Money Uganda, Gross Profit Contribution, 2009-12
  • Figure 11: Monthly churn rates for MTN Mobile Money Uganda users (three months)
  • Figure 12: Conceptual and practical challenges caused by synergy value