There’s an old saying, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.”

We’ve found this to be true in the work we do. The people who are best at delivering will be asked by more people to deliver on more tasks. The jobs pile on up. The beneficial by-product of this is that the busy person tends to become even more efficient at using available time and resources. They become invaluable for the organisations they represent.

The detrimental by-product though is that every busy person has a tipping point where they can no longer deliver to meet all demands. They need to delegate and/or prioritise, often with the possibility of slipping deadlines. Too much load can lead to the busy person feeling overwhelmed. Too much dependency on one person can lead to bottlenecks.

How the most efficient becomes the bottleneck

We see this same analogy carrying over into OSS. Across multiple layers of OSS in fact:

  • The solutions we build are typically “the busiest system/s” in an organisation’s IT stable. They are the linchpin. Because they’re so capable, efficient and flexible, they’re asked to take on more jobs, more functionality. Many other solutions integrate with them because they’re able to deliver to or enrich the functionality of other solutions.
  • The people who design, build, operate and maintain OSS always have large backlogs of tasks to perform. If you’ve worked at any telco that customises its own OSS, you’ll have experienced this first-hand. If you’ve worked on any OSS soultions that rely upon an Agile delivery model, you’ll have experienced this. You’ll have seen that there’s a never-ending stream of new functionality that lands with the OSS team to implement because they are the telco’s “busy person.”

In many cases, the OSS people and products are the most obvious places to turn when you need something done to ensure operations remain streamlined.

At SunVizion, we see examples of this all the time. We provide solutions that become so essential to the operations of our clients’ organisations that our clients raise many change requests. These change requests range from having broad application across all customers to specific changes to optimising for a single organisation. They range from high transaction volumes (such as network automations) to once-off or special-purpose use (such as unique data ingest, translation and migration tools).

What drives SunVizion’s work?

As a vendor, this is really exciting from a few perspectives. We see and are motivated by:

  • Clients using and adapting our solutions in ways we never expected
  • How pivotal our solutions are to efficient daily operations
  • Changes in technologies, processes, approaches, integrations and much more as experienced by our clients, leading to ongoing evolution, refinement and improvement of our solutions
  • Identification of innovative product opportunities
  • Seeing new ways to better serve our customers

The SunVizion catalogue of products and capabilities have grown considerably over the years and continues to evolve each day in response to client needs. It is a blessing that our products, and the services teams that support them, are seen to be the trusted “busy person / solution” by our many clients. We also deeply understand that our clients are dependent upon the efficiency, performance and reliability of our solutions.

Our people also understand that we have the honour of working alongside our clients’ busy people. We feel for these people because we know they’re in high demand internally for business as usual (BAU) activities as well as project activities. We see it as our responsibility to absorb as much of their load as possible during implementations. However, we also know that these customer experts are essential conduits for translating operational, technical and organisational insights into the solutions we build for their organisations. We know the solutions will be richer as a result of their local knowledge.

Whichever way you slice it, we know that if you want anything relating to an OSS done, then a busy person (or system) will be bound to end up doing it!