Telecommunications project management - a holistic approach for operations-related services

Telecommunications industry is undergoing a rigorous paradigm shift and value migration from equipment sales towards operations related services, providing long-term, ongoing operations rather than one-time deployment and commissioning. With project complexity and lifetime constantly increasing, the nature of contracting and vendor-operator partnership changes. Research explores the degree to which executive sponsors¿ role and influence in the planning phase of the service project management lifecycle contribute to project performance. Organizations are embracing concepts of formal project management as a critical element of their organizational structure to increase efficiency, adopting dedicated service project management concepts to improve customer relationship and reduce non-conformance costs, and integrating the concept of the ¿implementation-oriented sales process¿, which provides a better basis for closing long-term, stable and profitable operations services transactions. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach to operations project management with the goal to reduce economic losses, improve resource allocations, and advance organizational learning.