The Law of Incremental Planning: The First Transformation Killer

Last week we looked at some of the early indicators that tell you the network transformation is imminent. This week, we will start looking at key aspects that delay the transformations. I have put together four laws and we will start with the first law today.

In most of the companies the networks are planned and built by Operational Planning teams. These teams have the task of building the network to meet the business needs. They have a limited horizon of working, and at a maximum they look at one year horizon, but typically they plan the network quarter at a time.

Now let us look at various growth scenarios as below:-

 We are deliberately looking at aggressive growth scenarios, 30% YoY to 100% YoY as considering transformations at lower rate of growth is quite difficult. The law of incremental planning makes sure that even that higher rates of growth, the operator shies away from starting a transformation.

Let us look first at the ground reality that the engineer who plans the network growth for a quarter, when he compares the current network working growth network, he finds that the growth does not justify evaluating and creating a new architecture because of the effort and cost it will take, let alone that fact that it will delay the network buildout and jeopardize the business.

Even when we shift the focus to one year planning we may still not able to see that the new network we built during the year is big enough to start thinking on a new way to build infrastructure.At the best case of 100% growth, at the end of the quarter the older network is still 80% of the total and the new we built in the quarter is just 20%, so we keep the focus on current and the new does not warrant exploration of better ways of building.

At 50% year on year growth, the new network at the end of the year is still only 33% of the total network.

Only when we start seeing things at the five year scale we start realizing that the current architecture may not be the best thing, the amount of capacity we are deploying will need its own newer architecture.

Even with 30% year on year growth, the new network built at the end of 5 years is 73% of the total network. One must shift the focus to longer horizon if one wants to escape the law of incremental planning.

Stay tuned for more next week.