Re-Think of an Organizational ChangeI joined Huawei, a leading global telecommunications provider six years ago and worked as standard engineer in Department of Wireless Standard and Patent. This department was set up in 2003 after Huawei received several patent infringement lawsuits from the key players in Telecom Industry including Ericsson, Nokia, Nortel and Alcatel. The mission of the department is to “build Huawei’s competitiveness by IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) cross licensing”.
In the first two and half years, I worked as a 3GPP (www.3gpp.org) standard delegate on behalf of Huawei. Standards play a key role in the telecom industry not only by steering future trends, but also by generating companies own essential patents (the patents in the industry standard specifications) for cross licensing with other companies. However, my work as a 3GPP standards delegate made me increasingly aware that Huawei’s standards activities often focused solely on patent generation and rarely conformed to the requirements from the telecom operators. For example, our standards team pushed our “multi-cast” solution in the universal mobile telecommunications system, but our product management team did not implement it in our own products due to low interest from carriers, neither did other competitors. As a result, although we could declare to own many IPRs on this “multi-cast” feature, we were unable to cross license these IPRs with other companies since no one needs it. Furthermore, such kind of standard activities would also damage our image in the operators’ eyes since they may consider that Huawei did not understand their problems and needs. However, even if the research teams were aware of such situations, they sometimes overlooked the problem. There was an obvious advantage to push such solution into standard since no other companies would block it due to lack of interests. I discussed these findings with the director of my department and proposed incorporating marketing and product strategy into our standard activities. The director of standard shared the same feeling with me, and he agreed to let me have a trial in the department to define standards strategies to guide the activities in the global standard organizations.
The main idea of my proposal was to define the position of each research topic according to the customers’ needs and our marketing strategy. With the director’s consent, I quickly found another two colleagues and built up a small team called “wireless standard strategy team” to carry on this proposal. We first went through the research areas of the ongoing projects to identify the topics that did not align with our customers’ requirement or our marketing strategies. Meanwhile, we also tried to set up some criteria to access the topics. Then, we started to talk with the project managers and persuaded them to abandon those misaligned topics. Although the managers showed their willing to change, they actually did nothing to
We developed a way of asking the customers to pay a subscription for the best services which are targeted to existing customers and also to provide the data, with the goal of helping us increase our total revenue by 500%! Our team showed us a lot of potential for future growth, and many customer partners have signed up to participate in the project
We also started to work with our customers and their management teams so that all data that is required for each project can be transferred to the client by email, SMS or other mobile service. This way we could also reach customers without having to have access to their personal details.
The second project was started from the same location as the previous one and it was called Project ENCYCLE
The new project was a collaboration of our project managers, some of them, we were lucky to meet with, who all wanted a better experience for customers to get their feedback and then provide it.
We got the results from project.org. That was a great outcome with a lot of good feedback from my customer partners, I was able to understand which issues were important and when to take action (for most projects).
The last and biggest success of this project is that it made our marketing plan more effective. The problem faced us by our marketing team was not the technicality of how to communicate with customers, or the amount of customer information, but just its the way to manage the customer and their company.
The final outcome is a better UX that enables the best use cases for this project. Moreover it means that we have a much higher number of projects, and our success will not depend on the individual success of all of these projects. Therefore we could have a very positive experience with the following clients and their team:
We have reached the high goal of having more than 50% of all product and customer experiences being analyzed by our customers
Our teams have been working pretty hard to get the most valuable experiences for their customers
Many of our clients are now in an online role due to their ability to manage their business without having to worry about losing money. Moreover all information related to customers needs to be included in the application and in the project to understand its application, in fact most of them are looking for a brand that can help their company out.
After this project was started in July 2014, we will move closer to the beginning of 2015
We believe that the next project will be a solution for many and the best of these solutions can be achieved by using different data sources, using different platforms and with different types of tools. So in this context, you see the opportunity to integrate more and better with traditional methods and new techniques of research methods
If we can take this feedback of our marketing team to more mature and more responsible platforms in 2016, why can’t other marketing tools be used to help in this solution?
We developed a way of asking the customers to pay a subscription for the best services which are targeted to existing customers and also to provide the data, with the goal of helping us increase our total revenue by 500%! Our team showed us a lot of potential for future growth, and many customer partners have signed up to participate in the project
We also started to work with our customers and their management teams so that all data that is required for each project can be transferred to the client by email, SMS or other mobile service. This way we could also reach customers without having to have access to their personal details.
The second project was started from the same location as the previous one and it was called Project ENCYCLE
The new project was a collaboration of our project managers, some of them, we were lucky to meet with, who all wanted a better experience for customers to get their feedback and then provide it.
We got the results from project.org. That was a great outcome with a lot of good feedback from my customer partners, I was able to understand which issues were important and when to take action (for most projects).
The last and biggest success of this project is that it made our marketing plan more effective. The problem faced us by our marketing team was not the technicality of how to communicate with customers, or the amount of customer information, but just its the way to manage the customer and their company.
The final outcome is a better UX that enables the best use cases for this project. Moreover it means that we have a much higher number of projects, and our success will not depend on the individual success of all of these projects. Therefore we could have a very positive experience with the following clients and their team:
We have reached the high goal of having more than 50% of all product and customer experiences being analyzed by our customers
Our teams have been working pretty hard to get the most valuable experiences for their customers
Many of our clients are now in an online role due to their ability to manage their business without having to worry about losing money. Moreover all information related to customers needs to be included in the application and in the project to understand its application, in fact most of them are looking for a brand that can help their company out.
After this project was started in July 2014, we will move closer to the beginning of 2015
We believe that the next project will be a solution for many and the best of these solutions can be achieved by using different data sources, using different platforms and with different types of tools. So in this context, you see the opportunity to integrate more and better with traditional methods and new techniques of research methods
If we can take this feedback of our marketing team to more mature and more responsible platforms in 2016, why can’t other marketing tools be used to help in this solution?
We developed a way of asking the customers to pay a subscription for the best services which are targeted to existing customers and also to provide the data, with the goal of helping us increase our total revenue by 500%! Our team showed us a lot of potential for future growth, and many customer partners have signed up to participate in the project
We also started to work with our customers and their management teams so that all data that is required for each project can be transferred to the client by email, SMS or other mobile service. This way we could also reach customers without having to have access to their personal details.
The second project was started from the same location as the previous one and it was called Project ENCYCLE
The new project was a collaboration of our project managers, some of them, we were lucky to meet with, who all wanted a better experience for customers to get their feedback and then provide it.
We got the results from project.org. That was a great outcome with a lot of good feedback from my customer partners, I was able to understand which issues were important and when to take action (for most projects).
The last and biggest success of this project is that it made our marketing plan more effective. The problem faced us by our marketing team was not the technicality of how to communicate with customers, or the amount of customer information, but just its the way to manage the customer and their company.
The final outcome is a better UX that enables the best use cases for this project. Moreover it means that we have a much higher number of projects, and our success will not depend on the individual success of all of these projects. Therefore we could have a very positive experience with the following clients and their team:
We have reached the high goal of having more than 50% of all product and customer experiences being analyzed by our customers
Our teams have been working pretty hard to get the most valuable experiences for their customers
Many of our clients are now in an online role due to their ability to manage their business without having to worry about losing money. Moreover all information related to customers needs to be included in the application and in the project to understand its application, in fact most of them are looking for a brand that can help their company out.
After this project was started in July 2014, we will move closer to the beginning of 2015
We believe that the next project will be a solution for many and the best of these solutions can be achieved by using different data sources, using different platforms and with different types of tools. So in this context, you see the opportunity to integrate more and better with traditional methods and new techniques of research methods
If we can take this feedback of our marketing team to more mature and more responsible platforms in 2016, why can’t other marketing tools be used to help in this solution?