Powering the Workforce in Telecommunications

Through our Managed Services solution, North Highland has partnered with a global telecommunications company over the past eight years to bring dependable, scalable, high-performance workforces in Business Analysis and Project Management. Our approach, offering flexibility, skillset development, and ongoing service assurance, has strengthened and empowered the client’s workforce to deliver its key strategic initiatives, while fostering agility to keep pace with the accelerated rate of disruption in the telecommunications industry.

Client Situation

Our client, a global telecommunications provider, strives to be an industry-leading, customer experience-focused digital business against a backdrop of economic and political instability, industry disruption, and change. Initially, the company had faced challenges supporting traditional revenue streams under pressure from increased competition and commoditization. As a result, the client developed an innovation plan, ambitious 5G strategy, and data platform partnership. The client was focused on several key strategic priorities:

  • Investing in technology-driven transformation to increase speed to market while continuing to meet the needs of the wider business
  • Targeting innovation to reduce risk in an increasingly unstable economic and political environment
  • Reducing the cost of IT delivery while maintaining quality and meeting business objectives
  • Adapting to regulatory challenges including requirements from Ofcom, GDPR, IFRS, SOX, etc.

Our Approach

Built over the course of an eight-year partnership, North Highland brought its Managed Services to the client with an understanding of its culture, people, and strategic priorities. We knew that the client needed a stable, embedded delivery partner with a proven track record for quality execution. It needed to move to a more agile, iterative way of delivering its key programs while mitigating the cost of reliance on multiple suppliers.

Through its Managed Services solution, North Highland has empowered the organization with the benefit of flexibility. We first brought a dependable, scalable, high-performance workforce in Business Analysis and, due to the success of the partnership, the client later expanded the Managed Service to include Project Management roles.

Operating in a climate that commands increasingly agile innovation and product delivery, the client can tap into a resource pool with the right blend of skills, enabling projects to be quickly ramped up and delivered into early life support—all without compromising on cost and quality. There are several key elements that continue to differentiate the Managed Services partnership:

  • Flexibility: We’ve provided the right teams with the right skills that can scale and adapt quickly as dependencies and business cases shift. Our service gives the client the confidence to embed new systems and tech-driven business changes knowing that they will improve the experiences of their customers.
  • Skills: Our people development has been consistently aligned with the evolving needs of our client. With our service, the client has been able to avoid the high fixed cost of hiring permanent people and can flex more easily into new technologies without having to recruit and then have redundancy issues later. Our teams can deliver in Waterfall, Agile, and hybrid approaches. We’ve consistently added value and future-proofed the client’s workforce by upskilling permanent employees—leaving the company better off than when it started working with us.
  • Service Assurance: Throughout the Managed Services engagement, we’ve provided a dedicated Service Delivery Manager and exposure to domain expertise. We partnered with the client to define KPIs at the outset of the engagement and transparently measure performance against these metrics in an ongoing manner. North Highland is also committed to actioning upon feedback to maximize outcomes.

“North Highland is the glue that holds our strategic programs together” - IT Sourcing Manager

Value Delivered 

With the velocity of transformation across the telecommunications industry, our Managed Services solution has embedded workforce capacity and capability, enabling the client to deliver on evolving industry imperatives. Through flexible resourcing, the client receives ongoing access to multi-skilled delivery consultants with best-in-class expertise—ultimately building the right teams with the right skills. Throughout the partnership, we’ve maintained a close focus on trusted sourcing, onboarding, and delivery, so our client’s leadership team can continue to focus on strategies to grow the core business.

Through a focus on building community, North Highland has also maintained an ongoing commitment to upskilling, enabling, developing, and continuously engaging the client’s workforce.

Finally, we’ve maintained dedication to service assurance and results. North Highland continues to provide best-in-class service quality with guaranteed KPIs and SLAs. Our methods allow better control of full-lifecycle IT delivery costs, reduction of risk, and strategic planning support.

Through our ongoing Managed Services partnership, North Highland has been a critical extension to the client’s teams, working together to cultivate the high-functioning talent needed to execute the organization’s mission-critical strategic initiatives.

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