Network operations support programme and vendor evaluation

The challenge

The client's fibre business needed an operations support system covering the active network, passive plant, provisioning, fault and performance management, workforce, ticketing and coverage. Buying a suite meant lock-in; building one meant defining the programme properly first. In parallel, three operating companies of the same group wanted a common approach to selecting vendors.

Programme definition

We authored the complete document set: requirements, business overview, vision and strategy, reference architecture, solution blueprint, capability blueprint, target operating model and a phase-zero backlog, sequenced across five waves over 36 months. An independent programme review then checked cross-document alignment, identified around 24 capability gaps and set out twelve near-term recommendations with a risk analysis.

Engineering bootstrap

A monorepo implements the first capabilities on a locked stack: Go services, PostgreSQL with PostGIS, Kafka with a schema registry, Temporal workflows, an API gateway, identity management and a full observability stack on Kubernetes, designed for two-site active-active operation. It includes a resource inventory service, a GIS and outside-plant service with a public coverage portal, shared libraries and a scaffolder that generates a production-ready service skeleton in one command.

Multi-country vendor evaluation

We restructured the need into a five-domain framework (planning and design; unified inventory; provisioning and activation; fault and performance; customer and integration) with cross-cutting requirements for standards alignment, per-country data residency and multi-tenant deployment, then produced the RFI package, a versioned vendor shortlist, a weighted scoring matrix and per-vendor briefs, and supported the pitch evaluations.