A Billing Migration – nightmare scenario?

Alex Leslie - Jun 29, 01:04 PM

Alex Leslie recently talked to a leading operator in the Asia Pacific region. She had just completed a billing migration of their entire customer base.

What needed to be done?

The situation at the start of the project was that the old, in-house developed, legacy billing system needed replacing. There was no user guide, very little if any documentation and most of the people who knew the old system had left. The rest left within months. The system was in no way table driven, and to change anything meant brave expeditions into the code itself. There was, as you would expect, extensive patching and therefore no trust in the data itself.

What did she do?

Several million customers needed to be migrated onto a new system that had also been developed in-house. The timeframe was six months. They decided on 40 separate migrations and against a ‘big bang’ approach because of the lack of trust in the data. They managed the migrations along the lines of bill runs, dividing the customer base by simple consumer, complex consumer and corporate.

What went wrong?

Only one small, but slightly embarrassing thing went wrong, but worth noting – in migrating a group of suspended customers they activated them in the system for one day. This was fine, except that these customers then received bills for one day’s usage. This was not popular with some of them.

There were not enough good people involved in the project who knew the old system. They had to analyse the customer base down to groups of 50 or 100 customers to be confident that they would complete the migrations successfully.

There were some small issues with bill presentation the month following that segment’s migration.

What went right?

The project was successful and was completed on time and within budget.

What she learned

That the success of the project depended to a large extent on executive support. The CEO was on the steering committee and therefore the team had decision making abilities at the highest level.

That projects like these must have a high profile within the organisation, you simply cannot undertake projects like this ‘under the radar’.

Although the project provided an opportunity to rationalise rate plans, which needed doing, a bigger opportunity was missed – to work with Marketing and other areas of the business in the rationalisation process. Better, more relevant products could have been designed and launched.

The aim should be to migrate as little of the old complexity as possible.

You should never underestimate the amount of the effort involved. The advice is to work out the worst case in terms of effort – and then add 50%.

That having outside experts with actual experience of migrations would have been a very worthwhile investment.

What would she do differently next time?

Undertake more detailed planning, you can never do enough!

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