Qwest: Finding Solutions in Internal Data
Qwest Communications had a need to provide technicians and sales support staff with quick access to vast amounts of corporate data pertaining to trouble tickets and telecommunications. This information was vital to daily operations of the communications network and Qwest had no internal tools to satisfy the need.
Challenge
After pilot projects to manage trouble tickets and provide access to equipment operational data, Qwest recognized the value of simple tools to allow their support staff to better survey the network. With internal lead times of over a year, getting custom departmental tools had been difficult and expensive.
The key to being successful within Qwest was to provide solid returns on investment, fast turn-around times and reasonable cost. Workstate brought experience with managing large amounts of data through intuitive user interfaces and showed Qwest that valuable corporate data could be put to work in relatively short periods of time.
Results
Workstate offered Qwest an alternative – rapid, affordable development of data-centric tools. We collaborated with management in the operations division to define and develop the tools to leverage corporate data that was not yet being used. By focusing on providing custom access to key stores of data, we were able to help the operations team act more quickly in response to network events.
For the trouble ticket system project, Workstate built custom views of the corporate ticket system to help operations prioritize issues and visually assess the load of issues in queue.
Workstate also recognized that, in the course of trouble-shooting issues, Qwest operational support staff would have to manually search for information in over 20 separate pieces of equipment. After Workstate developed tools to collect and centrally organize this information, Qwest staff technicians were able to research issues in a fraction of the time.