These are the things I can do with your help.

I’ve been reviewing my 2018 accomplishments to help me craft my 2019 #GNO.

Here is a preliminary list for 2019:

➜Write 500 words every day
➜Spend 1 hour/day on building my network
➜Try something new every month
➜Send my newsletter every Sunday night
➜Publish a full blog post every Tuesday
➜Engage on LinkedIn every day
➜Shoot one video each week
➜Help at least one person every day on LinkedIn
➜Create and track my personal KPIs
➜Remove at least 1 task from my todo list every day

I also plan to start each day by writing, by hand, each of these goals as a short sentence. I’ve read that doing that can help maintain focus on achieving them.

This list is mostly personal items, combining efforts from both my businesses, Intelefy (wireless consulting) and Bangkok Beach Telecom (career development and training).

Any suggestions for me on this list?

Are you thinking about your own 2019 objectives?

What things will you put on your list?

Leave me a comment with your 2019 GNOs.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Do this before the New year arrives.

In my last update, we talked about things to do during a #Telecoms #NetworkFreeze. One of those things was to prepare for the new year.

Here are things I’m thinking about as the New Year approaches. No particular order.
✅Prepare the New Year budget.
✅Have you identified recurring activities which can be automated?
✅Have you agreed on Goals and Objectives, #GNOs, for the people in your team individually, and for the team as a whole?
✅Do you have a plan in place to achieve each KPI your team will be measured by?
✅Can you speed Cost Containment projects, to realize the savings sooner?
Do you have a formal way, like a Dashboard, to track these KPIs?
✅Have you pre-populated your calendar with any special events, such as sports, conferences, political meetings, religious festivals

What’s the number 1 thing you’re thinking about preparing for the new year? Leave me a comment.

In my next message, I’ll talk about my #resolutions for 2019.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

What do you do to stay warm in a freeze?

Yesterday we talked about the Network Freeze. Here’s a link to that discussion: https://lnkd.in/gU8kQQN

During a network Freeze, many of your coworkers are OOTO. The pace in the office might be a little slower. Fewer meetings, phone calls, emails; fewer interruptions.

There might be time to work on back-burner projects, or maybe not-yet-approved projects.

I like to work on automation, such as:

✅AWK one-liners, shell command pipelines, simple scripts.
✅Dashboards, license trackers, forecasting and modeling tools, what-if analyses.
✅If there’s a script I’ve been designing, this can be a good time to make progress on that.

Automation is always a win because it pays back a lot more than time savings.

This is also a good time to coach my team on non-technical tasks I routinely do. It helps them to develop their skills and lets me see who is farthest along.

Prepping to begin new year projects and budgets.

New year prep is a big enough topic that we’ll discuss it more tomorrow.

What things are you working on during this network freeze?

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Does your network freeze over the holidays?

Many networks do. It’s common in Telecoms to freeze network changes during holidays.

During a Network Freeze, few maintenance activities are scheduled.

A freeze is smart when so many people are out of the office OOTO. Not only your own support staff but vendors and service providers, too.

Any outage caused by a planned maintenance activity is bad. But an outage worsened by a lack of support staff can really hurt your career. So don’t do that.

The freeze is announced by the Network Head weeks in advance and again when the freeze starts. Other departments know their pet projects won’t make progress in the network during the freeze.

A freeze covers major holidays: Christmas & NewYear, Ramadan; LunarNewYear; GoldenWeek in Japan; Songkran in Thailand; August in Europe. Any time many of the staff are OOTO.

During a network freeze, Technical staff works even harder than normal to avoid outages. Mostly by not messing with the kit.

What holidays cause your network to freeze? Leave me a comment with your freeze periods.

With so many people OOTO, the pace can seem a little slower. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to keep warm during a freeze.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Are you following the progress of #eSIM?

I believe eSIM will be a significant change agent for the Mobile industry. I’ve posted many eSIMs updates.

I evaluated eSIMs for a client during 2018. We concluded that the time was not yet right to add an eSIM to the client’s product, and selected a traditional form factor instead.

At that time, I though eSIM would become mainstream within 12-18 months.

That was 9 months ago. And although progress is coming, resistance, primarily from MNO, continues to slow things down.

I recently spoke with Rune Holbech of Nordic eSIM. I wanted to better understand his view of the eSIM opportunity, and of the Nordic eSIM platform.

I was quite impressed with Rune’s knowledge and with the commercial penetration of Nordic eSIM. The eSIM platform space can expect to grow along with M2M and IoT and IIoT, so Nordic eSIM seems well-positioned as the industry matures.

Who do you follow to improve your understanding of eSIM?

👉Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg,  for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.