You may also be interested to hear that the TM Forum has followed up the approval of the maturity model by commissioning a new training course about revenue assurance maturity and the maturity model. I will be delivering the course for the first time at Billing & Information Management Systems 2008 on Tuesday, June 10 in Amsterdam.

If there is sufficient demand, the TM Forum intends to repeat the course at other events, and make it available in the form of a video that can be streamed over the internet. Please drop in and say hello if you are going to be in Amsterdam. If you are not going to BIMS this year, but would like the TM Forum to put on the course elsewhere, or would like to be able to access the course over the web, let me know. Better still, tell the TM Forum’s Training Director, George Greenlee. George can be reached at ggreenlee@tmforum.org or +353-21-488-8179.

Following approval, we will release the long-promised Revenue Assurance Maturity Assessment (RAMA) tool, designed to make it easy for operators and service providers to gauge revenue assurance maturity in their own business. If you want to be notified of the release of RAMA, please email maturity@revenueprotect.com.

The Revenue Assurance Maturity Model is now available to all members of the TM Forum. It has been published as a self-contained annex (annex B) to the TMF Revenue Assurance Guidebook (reference GB941). To download it from the TM Forum website; see here.

We are also developing the Revenue Assurance Maturity Assessment (RAMA) tool, designed to make it easy for operators and service providers to gauge revenue assurance maturity in their own business. If you want to be notified of the release of RAMA, please email maturity@revenueprotect.com.

See the following links for more information about revenue assurance maturity.

• The five stages of maturity described in the model
• The five aspects of business performance used to assess revenue assurance maturity
• The goals and principles adopted when developing the RA maturity model
• Sponsors of the TMF RA maturity program
• Some details of how the new revenue assurance maturity model was developed

Organisation

Organisation of revenue assurance responsibilities reflects how well aligned the objectives of individual staff and of the business as a whole to the goals of revenue assurance. Organisational fit is also a reflection of the business culture and the extent to which the business culture is suited to genuinely adopting revenue assurance objectives.

People

The maturity of revenue assurance can in part be gauged from the human resource dedicated to revenue assurance or providing secondary support.

Influence

The ability to proactively instigate, manage and deliver change is a sign of mature revenue assurance. Influential revenue assurance delivers financial rewards to the business and a mechanism to continuously improve the satisfaction of revenue assurance against its full potential.

Tools

The use of tools is one of the most tangible guides to revenue assurance maturity. However, maturity relates to the cleverness of design and implementation, the synergy use of tools to meet multiple business objectives and the blend of activities supported by automation as well as the raw processing power, number and cost of tools.

Process

Revenue assurance involves the improvement of processes, but is itself a high-level process, containing many detailed processes, that should be improved over time.

1. No revenue assurance process, only arbitrary ad hoc reactions to circumstances as motivated by the prejudices of individuals and what data they obtain by accident.
2. Revenue assurance processes are developed at the level of individual projects, products and implementations. Flaws are identified and remedial action taken.
3. Revenue assurance processes are developed for the whole organisation. Organisational priorities for revenue assurance are understood and guide proactive deployment of resources.
4. Revenue assurance processes provide consistent quantitative measures. Measures drive planning and control.
5. The measures, planning and controls implemented in order to improve the business not only improve the business, but also themselves become the subject of planned, methodical and measured continual improvement.
]]> http://revenueprotect.com/community/5_stages_of_maturity http://revenueprotect.com/community/5_stages_of_maturity Tue, 08 May 2007 22:41:01 +0000 The evolutionary path described in the revenue assurance maturity model is based on real-life observation of revenue assurance in several providers since the year 2000. This is then extrapolated to characterise how the principles of revenue assurance might continue to develop in future. The future development proposed represents an ideal which can be used as a source of comparison for widely different businesses because they represent a rational extension of the underlying principles.

The descriptions given are couched in themes applicable to any business, such as organisation, status and technology. The descriptions avoid reference to systems, products or processes. Describing the model in terms of specifics would have made the description less abstract and easier to relate to real-life. However, this would have been at the cost of making the description less general, creating a barrier to comparison between providers with little similarity in terms of systems, products or processes.

The revised model significantly expands upon and amends the model presented in the TMF document TR131. The TR131 version was itself an expansion of an initial proposal made by T-Mobile to the TMF's RA technical team in 2004. The revised and enhanced version of the model has been made more useful than its predecessor on a practical level, through the addition of a detailed and reproducible questionnaire and scoring system. In addition, a number of errors and confusions in the TR131 model have been identified and eliminated. Many of those confusions related to a failure to distinguish revenue assurance from the nominal revenue assurance department.

]]> http://revenueprotect.com/community/development_of_the_maturity_mo http://revenueprotect.com/community/development_of_the_maturity_mo Tue, 08 May 2007 22:30:18 +0000 The goals of the revenue assurance maturity program were as follows:
• Provide a simple standard questionnaire that a revenue assurance manager, internal audit manager or similar can complete in less than 90 minutes purely from their existing knowledge of the business;
• Avoid quantitative measures of performance that may not be readily available or which prejudge priorities in each business;
• Present a simple scoring mechanism that will assist the brief presentation of results to executives and which will enable benchmarking between service providers; and
• Ensure the technique can be equally well applied to all types of electronic communications service provider, no matter what kind of business model, what customers it serves, the size of the business, its geographical markets, the technologies employed or any other factor.

The following principles were adopted to aid development of the maturity model:

• Assess the business as a whole, not just the department or people responsible for revenue assurance;
• State a model of growth that treats silo management of revenue assurance as a transitional stage but not as its ideal and ultimate conclusion;
• Address all relevant aspects of business performance and not just those currently in the scope of work or given management attention;
• Give a strategic roadmap that is simple but which clarifies what the next series of ambitions should be for the business;
• Borrow from the staged representation used in the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model Integration;
• Adopt a Deming-like model of continuous improvement, where performance follows a pattern of being increasingly repeatable, then measurable, and then predictable.
]]> http://revenueprotect.com/community/maturity_goals_and_principles http://revenueprotect.com/community/maturity_goals_and_principles Tue, 08 May 2007 22:00:29 +0000 The RA maturity assessment and benchmark was developed collaboratively by a number of service providers, consultancies and vendors working within the TeleManagement Forum. The working group was chaired by Revenue Protect. Representatives of the following organisations provided valuable input:
• Cable & Wireless
• cVidya
• Ernst & Young
• IBS
• SubexAzure
• Telenor
• Telstra
]]> http://revenueprotect.com/community/ra_maturity_sponsors http://revenueprotect.com/community/ra_maturity_sponsors Tue, 08 May 2007 21:52:31 +0000 Providing electronics communications services is complex. Technology and products are always changing, whilst customers remain demanding. In that environment, mistakes happen; and mistakes cost money. Lost revenues, unnecessary costs, negative margins and billing complaints – all can blight the unwary provider. The solution is revenue assurance. You can trust our experience and independence to guide you to delivering the best results for your company.

What is Revenue Assurance?




In short, revenue assurance is a discipline that combines elements of audit and data analysis to find, correct and prevent errors that damage financial performance. Empirical observation has shown over many years that the typical communications provider is full of “bugs” that cause it to undercharge, overcharge, incur unnecessary costs and commit other errors that damage financial results. The various techniques employed in revenue assurance can “debug” both systems and human processes, releasing value at relatively little cost. The trick is to use the right revenue assurance techniques for the business, which requires both an open mind and experience to judge the most efficient and effective ways of finding and preventing the biggest bugs the provider is likely to suffer from.

There are many other ways of explaining revenue assurance. The TM Forum, the world’s leading telecoms trade association, describes revenue assurance as the use of data quality and process improvement methods that improve profits, revenues and cash flows without influencing demand. Many firms emphasize an approach that suits their particular skills and experience. We believe there are many ways to deliver revenue assurance, but only one that is best for each customer. Our approach is to dispense with dogma, and to be pragmatic. We work with clients to understand their real priorities and then engage and collaborate with the right mix of experts and specialist suppliers to meet the customer's needs.]]> http://revenueprotect.com/community/home http://revenueprotect.com/community/home Mon, 01 Jan 2007 01:01:01 +0000