Wireless Application Service Provider – WASP

Vodacom’s Internal WASP division initiated a project aimed at streamlining and improving the current business processes, policies, and procedures. The division, which had technical expertise outsourced to a third party, generated revenues of over R100m per annum while servicing over 100 external service providers.

The Internal WASP Business Improvement Project, as the programme was titled, aimed to achieve its objectives by implementing policies and procedures against the identified gaps and envisaged enhancements; automating internal processes through a workflow system (Technology Support Provider Application) to aid in more efficient communication between the WASP and the Technology Providers. This would enable an efficient way of working and building capacity for the Internal WASP division to focus on critical strategic initiatives to grow the business and its people competencies.

Quarphix was therefore tasked with the fulfilment of the above mandate.

Our team initially composed of a Senior Process Engineer Manager, Senior Business Analyst, Senior Change Management Specialist, and a Project Integrator specialist.

Using Agile methodologies, we set off to immediately conduct a Gap analysis and Organisational Impact assessment to both adequately diagnose the problem root cause and to ensure that as we design the final solution embedding the DMAIC approach to internal and external stakeholders.

Post the Gap and Impact assessments, we were able to identify strategic change opportunities and thus consolidate an integrated project plan which was well received by the client. These assessments also revealed the magnitude of the task and how far-reaching the project’s impact would be in re-orienting the Vodacom to its objectives.

The nature of the WASP division was such that, it had a large contingent of external service providers (both small and large businesses whose revenues were dependent of the performance of WASP) and as such, our Business Process Management and Communications Engagement strategy became imperative to ensure that all stakeholders were timely informed about the nature of the procedure changes and how they’d be affected. This channel would also enable us to receive timeous feedback as we proceeded with our delivery. This project, we employed the DMAIC Methodology and ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement) models to achieve the desired state.

It also became clear that automation would play a leading role in the project, as the manual processes and procedures created bottlenecks and intangible accountability. Our team was then further capacitated with a Senior Process Developer, Software Architect and Quality System Testers to ensure that they are involved early in the project for optimal design and implementation of an efficient solution.

The project took 15 months to complete as scheduled, delivering on planned critical milestones for the client.