John Linton ...when all through the house, nothing was stirring, not even a 'louse'. (apologies to Mr Clement Clarke Moore).
I was reminded of that fragment from childhood much earlier this morning when I couldn't sleep and so got up and looked over the final release stages of the new HSPA service we are scheduled to begin making available from midnight tomorrow. Various Exetel personnel have spent most of Thursday and Friday with various Optus personnel in our office checking through the final 'ready to go' list of things that needed to have been done before now - as with every other 'go to market' project we have ever participated in with Optus not everything has been done (undoubtedly that's all because of Exetel's shortcomings and skills - sometimes I really struggle to understand how ineffective and inefficient Exetel seems to have become over the past almost five years).
I took the opportunity of my sleepless night to review, over a very large Scotch (or 2 or 3 as it turned out) just what we were going to attempt to do between now and December 23rd 2008 and suffered my usual bout of dismay at how difficult the targets looked. Of course it hadn't helped that my originally planned start date of July 1st was now looking more like October 15th as even the 'conservative at the time' date of tomorrow midnight will now not allow a 'full blast' start of this key development.
I got so irritated with what I saw was the results of the delays that I called the HSPA company I have been dealing with in London (the big time difference between Sydney and the UK works for you on occasions) to see if I could get some assistance from them in getting the HuaWei 'sticks' and some other assistance. Always affable and ready to do sensible business they were only too happy to help but (because of the 'branding on the device itself and the software pre-loaded) they couldn't solve my immediate problem of no usable hardware for tomorrow. I thanked them and apologised for the unannouced call and went back to my irritation - only slightly ameliorated by a second glass.
It was a sign of my severe annoyance at the situation that I contemplated cancelling the whole Australian HSPA project with Optus for almost an hour as I tried to find a way round losing so much time already and knowing that, based on what I was now seeing and what I had experienced in the past, that there would be too many 'unforseen' issues over the next three months for the simple (and in my stupididity what I had thought were easy enough) targets to be accomplished.
So having blamed myself for my lack of maintaining control over the implementation schedule for a gloom laden 60 minutes or so I poured myself a third glass of JW's second best blend and wrote a list of things to be done over the next 48 hours to attempt to address the damage that it was now too late to repair. I then felt able to sleep so I left further thinking till later.
So, I've reviewed my list, at least those items that are legible and not too truncated in notation to remain comprehensible in the bright sunshine of a really nice Sydney Spring morning, and will try to put in place a release schedule that has some chances of achieving as much of the original plans as possible.
I think I have come up with some realistic 'repair jobs' but, as always, only time will tell. I am very much looking forward to the next few weeks in terms of seeing just how the HSPA service performs in a wide variety of user circumstances and just how effective a very small company like Exetel can make an 'impact' on the HSPA marketplaces (that I believe all other carriers and resellers have got so monumentally wrong to date).
We will have to take far more 'risks' than I feel happy about but too many future plans and actions depend on getting the originally planned results by the end of calendar 2008 for there to be any other choice right now. In any event if we can't make this work by spending more money than we had planned over the nxt three months then that will be fairly obvious sign that spending much higher levels of money in Australia over the following six months would simply be money wasted.
Similarly, if I am correct in my assumptions, any excess money spent now will return itself much quicker and with more benefits than a slower approach. As Wellington advised - "never fight until you absolutely have to but always take in to consideration that you may never find better ground than you are standing on".
Roll on Monday.