John Linton
Amidst the many minute by minute tasks that occupy most of every working and weekend day I have been attempting to finalise my recommendations for the major projects that Exetel needs to aim for and how they should be staffed and funded over the balance of this financial year and into FY2009.
I haven't been able to shake off the feeling of 'doom and gloom' that descended on me after the recent election and the subsequent early statements by the doctrinal throwbacks to the 19th century who will now attempt to play out their ill understood fantasies - err - policies over the next 18 months before reality consigns their 'initiatives' to where they belong. However we have responsibilities to 65,000 customers and 30 employees not to mention to our own major financial exposures that are more important than how that bunch of no-hopers fritter away the financial well being that has been bequeathed to them.
I think I have culled the options to a realistic short list in terms of a sensible project list for the coming 6 - 12 months which has the two projects we failed to complete this year - find a 3G data delivery solution to which Exetel can add real value and find a better price/performance routing solution to the current Cisco 7300 scenario plus some/all of:
1) decide on the viability/schedule for MSANs in capital city CBDs and related business areas.
2) decide whether wireless could provide a better business solution than MSANs
3) complete Phase I of GURUS
4) implement large scale mirror facilities with/without Akamai/other company involvement
5) activate WA PoP
6) decide on international bandwidth strategy involving STM16 from Southern Cross or another major carrier
7) negotiate gateway access to a major mobile carrier's network
8. decide on what future ADSL has past 2008 and put in place the service offering strategies that will protect Exetel
9) decide on direction of support processes moving forward
10) determine the funding strategy for Exetel over the next two years (sell company/inject personal money/lease/issue shares)
While it's pretty easy to, eventually, distill the actions required to manage the continuing existence of a company of Exetel's size to a simple list like the one above it's obviously a very different matter to make any of it happen not least because practically all of it needs additional funding that is unlikely to become available from month on month profitability.
For financing reasons alone it won't be possible to do everything on the current short list though this 'short list' is the result of removing double that number of desirable strategies/investments. A rough count of the money required to do everything on the current short list is over $A7.5 million which we would have immense difficulty finding even if we approached the prospect of doing so with far more confidence than I have at the moment.
The danger is, as anyone who has ever had to make a choice on where scarce financial resources get spent, is do the easiest things and leave the harder/hardest things out of any real planning process.
I will now need to spend as much time as I can make available over the remaining days before the Christmas break to finding out just how much money we can 'procure' from the various real options so that we can know exactly what we can and can't do in terms of affording the required investments - not my favourite pastime by any means and also not something I'm very good at.
In the mean time there are daily targets to meet and the usual number of 'urgent issues' to address.