The Sprint UC Story: Successful First Phase
The initial phase of Sprint’s migration to UC leveraged what we learned from the early adopters, which we talked about in my last post. These people provided excellent feedback as to the quality of the communications tools and their ease of adoption. We learned a lot from our pilot group, everything from which headsets worked the best, to optimal laptop settings and the best setup for home-based workers. This information helped us clean up our deployment processes and fill platform gaps.
The initial rollout plan and deployment was based on our evaluation of where we would get the most cost savings, which was determined to be remote and satellite office locations. This allowed us to remove the physical PBXs and edge circuits from each building. We later modified that approach, due to changes in our real estate strategy, and started focusing on larger locations. UC became a catalyst for ease of real estate consolidation and its corresponding cost savings from square footage reduction.
Another key to our successful deployment was our migration away from point to point circuits to Sprint’s GMPLS circuit offering. This provided network redundancy, creating self healing rings in the event of a physical service interruption. It also gave us native Quality of service (QoS) packet tagging at the WAN level. QoS data packet tagging enabled us to prioritize VoIP traffic ahead of some other data needs in order to avoid WAN congestion.
Communication with and overview training of our employees also was identified to be top priority. We’ll be the first to admit that we have learned as we progressed on this one. We started deployment with a quick communication contact with employees, provided road show demonstrations and handed out softphone headsets, expecting employees to use self-service vendor Q&A and training guides. We learned fairly quickly to communicate regularly prior to and following the immediate conversion to voice enablement of the platform. It was critical for employees to know well in advance when their building or site was converting to UC and what they had to do prepare.
As more people became engaged, we moved into mass training, which has proven to be the most effective approach. We scheduled one-hour sessions with large numbers of people, which is obviously easier on a main campus than in remote offices. During this training, we focused on the capabilities of the tools, the shortcuts embedded in the Microsoft suite, and some “tips and tricks” to make it easy to work successfully in a UC environment. As a result, we get far fewer trouble tickets from people who attended this mass training than from those who didn’t.
We also learned that the assignment of new phone numbers was conducive to a successful migration. Old numbers could be left active for a transition period, allowing the employee to ensure communication with key business and personal contacts. When we had to port specific numbers, we encountered problems with LEC processes and support. In most cases flash cuts did not occur without down time. Transitioning to a new number is easier and in the long run much more effective.
The issue of turning down local circuits has been more difficult than expected. We spent far more time than anticipated to ensure local phone companies stopped billing us even after a disconnect order. In some cases, it has taken more than four months to clear this up. We would advise other UC adopters to be prepared for this.
Overall the initial deployment has encountered little problem and has been well accepted by the employee base. Their ability to have full office functionality while being mobile has provided a productive flexible option for our staff. Economically, cost savings has been seen immediately and continues to build, which we’ll talk about in the next post.
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SubscribeTags: GMPLS, MPLS, SIP trunking, Sprint, Unified communications, VoIP
