Telegroup, Inc. was a small, but rapidly growing, privately-held international telecom company when Michael joined in 1974 as the new Director of Engineering.  He collected a small disparate group of 24 programmers, operations staff, and network technicians and built a unified, high-performance team that grew to 164 engineers and support personnel distributed across multiple locations and countries unified by a common vision.  He established a project management office and project teams to instill effective project management principals and practices.  Michael cultivated and mentored a culture within the Engineering Department as a service department closely aligned to supporting and furthering the goals of the company and the other departments. 

He initiated highly successful efforts to define and reengineer business processes supported by technology to improve business efficiency.  For example, Telegroup supported customers in 172 countries and the process to provision telecom services for new residential and small business customers would generally take 5 to 8 days and involved sales reps taking orders, sending faxes to Telegroup customer service, who would email customer service forms to switch technicians who manually created new customer data in the Telegroup telecom switches.  This was the common process for telecom carriers providing international service, even the large carriers, with many long delays, lost orders and incorrect provisioning.  After carefully analyzing the process and working with sales reps and customer support staff, Michael's technology team reengineered the process with an Internet web service to take new orders online, automatically add the data to customer databases, and send the data to newly developed telecom switch programs for automated provisioning.  The time to provision a new international customer went from an average of 6 days to less than one hour with a greatly reduce error rate and immensely improved customer satisfaction.  This was done in 1995 and marked Telegroup as a leader among telecom companies pioneering the use of the Internet to automate business processes.

The effective reengineering of technology and IT processes and their close alignment with the business processes of the sales and support departments enabled Telegroup to grow from a privately-held startup with 1994 revenues of $68.7M into a publicly-traded, facilities-based international telecom with revenues of $330M within four years.

CASE STUDY: CREATING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR EXCELLENCE

In dynamic, rapidly changing and seemingly chaotic markets, companies sometimes need a little help finding their feet and building a foundation for improved growth.  Convergia Networks, a fast growing international telecom with home offices in Montreal, contracted with Michael Lackman and StrategicPM (formerly known as CIT Solutions) to help manage and drive several mission critical projects: international customer requirements for a new customer billing system; and operations and back office IS/IT business processes analysis and evaluations.  Michael also worked to improve and strengthen their project management knowledge and maturity.

Frederick Miller, Chairman and CEO of Convergia Networks had this to say:

"Convergia has benefited greatly by the talent and expertise of Michael Lackman and CIT Solutions in evaluation and designing IT solutions for Convergia's back office systems.  Michael has also provided valuable insights and recommendations into many operational areas of the telecommunications industry and assistance in out staffing and workforce development.  He has shown a keen understanding of and expertise in establishing the operational processes and procedures necessary to manage the fast growth of Convergia's operations.  Convergia's continued growth and success during difficult times in the troubled telecommunications industry has been due in large part to our keen focus on execution.  Michael worked closely with Convergia's senior management to implement project management and improve processes and procedures for improved execution and management visibility."

Business excellence is gained through a march of a thousand steps.

Please contact us to learn more on how we can work together to achieve greater project success.