A pro sports team’s new coach always says this

“We’re gonna work on fundamentals: blocking, tackling, passing the ball.”

As Telecom Pros, we love the shiny and new: 5G, mmWave, network slicing, #MIMO, URLLC, CRAN. OK, so we like acronyms, too.

But when the excitement of sexy new technology wears off, there’s still a mobile network to maintain. And what does that mean? Reports. Lots and lots of reports.

Dashboards, analyses, forecasts, budgets, financial models, capacity planning. Not very exciting. But this is how a modern mobile network is run.

For you, that probably means Microsoft Excel. Which is fine, because #Excel is not very exciting, either.

But it’s pretty much the best tool you’ve got for all those uses. You owe it to yourself to acquire a reasonable facility using Excel.

Check out this article: Dashboard Automation with GETPIVOTDATA. One simple technique to automate your Dashboards. And if you can automate all the mind-numbing manual updates you have to do now, it does more than free your time.

It frees your mind to think hard about what the data are telling you. You’ll have new insights and synthesize new possibilities.

Try it before you say “they’re only reports.” Because reports are a huge time sink. Get in front of it.

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.