Context
Vidéotron is one of Canada's largest telecom operators, with more than 6,000 employees. It set out to replace a legacy, multi-system TV and internet stack with Helix, a new platform running on Etiya's cloud-native digital BSS. Etiya is the software company I worked for, and Vidéotron was its client.
The programme ran in phases. Phase 1 went live for internal users only. Phase 2 was the public launch: real customers, a national TV and radio campaign, billboards across Québec, and a go-live date that could not move because the media was already booked.
My role
I led a five-person business analysis team and owned Phase 2 end to end. I spent three months on site in Montréal, working directly with Vidéotron's teams to turn what they needed into requirements our engineers in Istanbul could build.
My role followed the project. I started as the business analyst gathering requirements, became the Product Owner for the Agile teams once development began, and by the end was working alongside QA to get the release through user acceptance testing.
The problem
Phase 2 touched almost every part of a telco's customer platform at once: authentication, provisioning, billing, inventory, consent management, the payment gateway, document and content management. Each came with its own team, and several came with external vendors (billing and payment, middleware, data warehouse, workforce management).
Then, during UAT, the project manager resigned. The launch date stayed where it was.
What I did
- Gathered requirements on the ground. Three months of on-site analysis: functional and non-functional requirements, captured as UX wireframes, flow diagrams, UML and user story maps that both sides could sign off.
- Mapped every integration point. Flowcharts that traced each customer journey across authentication, provisioning, billing, inventory, consent, payments, DMS and CMS, so every team could see where its system sat in the flow.
- Ran the backlog as Product Owner. Facilitated the daily stand-ups of several Scrum teams and refined each requirement just before development picked it up.
- Coordinated external stakeholders. I was the working link between Vidéotron's business teams, our engineers and the third-party vendors whose systems Helix had to talk to.
- Took over delivery when the lead left. I was the person who knew every requirement end to end, so I took over the handover and delivery, and coordinated a largely junior team through UAT to the launch.
Outcome
- Helix Phase 2 launched to the public on the committed date.
- The programme was a finalist in TM Forum's 2020 Excellence Awards, in the "Beyond Connectivity" category.
- Etiya publicly cites the programme as having launched Helix on a fully digital BSS in nine months.
What I learned
Write requirements so someone else could own them tomorrow. The handover worked because the knowledge was on paper and not only in people's heads. It is also where I learned to settle ownership explicitly at the start of a project, rather than find out who owns what when someone leaves.