Customer tick list
What do our customers need to do?
- Consider - What changes to customer’s business processes are planned, that may impact the working relationship with Colt?
- Decide - Do customers have any additional bandwidth needs or other services that may be required to provision for the Games period?
- Provide - Can customers provide early visibility of their orders to help plan and deliver, bearing in mind the Games timeframe, from the 27 July – 12 August and from the 29 August – 9 September?
What will we do for customers?
- Enable core services to meet the capacity and quality demands placed upon them throughout the Games period and resource appropriately for seamless customer delivery
- Provide timely updates to customers regarding any change control process that Colt may need to make for the provision of new services or service functionality as a result of the Games
- Work with customers, partners and our internal resources from across service centres, operational teams and support organisations to deliver business as usual activities
- Ensure Colt’s end to end supply chain is fully aligned
- Ensure operational plans are developed with as full an understanding as possible of any third party actions that could hamper delivery, such as restricted transportation in London
- Communicate openly and transparently with customers and partners in the run up to and during the Games.
Games capacity demand
Colt is upgrading the MPLS backbone to prepare for the increased capacity demands. We have carried out extensive intelligence work from previous instances of high network demand, reviewing network usage around such events as the Royal Wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. From this research, we have significantly increased capacity demand in specific network areas in preparation for the Games. We have also been working across all business units to anticipate forthcoming demand over the next few months and to get as much foresight of orders as possible.
“The Colt Games Steering Group and our third party suppliers are working in collaboration with the local authorities and various Olympic organisations, collecting detailed information around embargos and potential areas of concern. We have been able to carry out detailed planning which hopefully will ensure we can continue to serve Colt’s customers, providing as smart and fast service delivery as possible on the run up to and during the games” said Caroline Bedford, Service Delivery Senior Manager, Operations.
Keeping things going
We are compensating now for the future restrictions and planning as much as possible to ensure business as usual over the Games period. We are conducting a thorough inspection of our network along the Olympic Route Network, and ensuring that the physical network is in good order prior to any embargos. We are increasing network resilience by proactively rescheduling maintenance routines and ensuring outstanding faults on resilient paths are repaired and restored. Rapid response teams will also continually sweep the Olympic Route Network to clear issues on the physical network before faults arise. However, during the Games period, if a fault does occur in an area which we cannot access until a specific time e.g. along the Olympic Route Network, we may experience longer than normal delays in repair. Although protected services should not be affected, unprotected services may experience an extended outage. The vast majority of our customers have chosen to take advantage of the protection that’s built into our standard services, so unless you’ve specifically requested unprotected services, you should be fine.
We are looking at the logistics to best manage engineer mobility over this time with resource being available from multiple locations. Our field teams are preparing for the Games timeframe, planning routes based on TFL and other daily resources to monitor real-time congestion levels. We have also changed shift patterns to accommodate the restricted work time periods.
Over the next few weeks we will speak with our customers about their plans for this time period and ensure any changes they are making to their business, or any additional requirements they may have, are passed through to the relevant teams at Colt. This will include, for example, any required changes to times of site visits, additional security measures for site access or additional bandwidth needs
Visibility of future orders
Due to the access restrictions in place around the Olympic Route Network, getting visibility of customers’ orders as soon as possible will help us to plan and deliver, although there may be extended timeframes for order fulfilment if it is in an impacted area. In addition, be aware that the regulations for all utility organisations are liable to change over the next few weeks, but Colt will ensure flexibility in its planning to best deal with this.