Safaricom

Project Stories

Tackling business challenges for more than a decade

About the client/ project:

Safaricom is the largest telecommunications provider in Kenya, and one of the most profitable companies in the East and Central Africa region. 

Nowadays, it is seen as a purpose-led technology company, by providing a wide range of services and solutions, including mobile voice, messaging, data, financial and converged services, and digital services that enable commercial and personal platforms as well as ecosystem partnerships.

Celfocus has a long-term and trustable relationship with Safaricom, helping the client to tackle business challenges for more than a decade. Our track record shows 100% project delivery success. We always deliver.

We have many successful recent examples of transformation projects being delivered, such as the Siebel Upgrade (2016), CBS Upgrade (2018), OM Upgrade to version 6 (2020), Siebel Upgrade (2021) and TIBCO CE (2022).

What & how did we deliver?

At the beginning of 2022, we renewed our contract and with that, we re-shaped both streams, “development” and “operations” into a unified one.

That’s when we took the opportunity to suggest and make an important move: Drop the waterfall and apply an Agile methodology.

Despite the delivery change approach, we continue to address business requirements as well to support a 3^rd line of Operations on the following streams:

• Oracle Siebel CRM - Customer Relation Management System
• Celfocus Order Management
• TIBCO / ESB
• Web Selfcare portal - where some of Consumer & Enterprise /capabilities are availed to the customers.

More recently, we WON a new business PO, having increased the number of teams, being now two (2) in Safaricom project, to address two technical projects that are part of the Safaricom Roadmap for 2024:

• Celfocus Order Management Upgrade to the latest v6.3
• Oracle Siebel CRM Upgrade to the latest IP23.

To deliver the aforementioned services, Celfocus has adopted the Kanban methodology, following a full DevOps approach as below:

Being committed to the Kanban continuous deliveries, a Delivery flow was built to respond to the various areas of Business Requirements, innovation and also to address specific Operations requirements with respective SLAs.

This model allows us to easily scale up any team that addresses scope within the same product backlog.
 

What was the added value for the client?

Implementation of a model that resulted in the following outcomes:

• A collaborative and business value-driven culture.
• Compliant with the Safaricom digital transformation framework.
• Faster output value (throughput), more flexibility, and transparency on the workflow requests.
• Multidisciplinary team, leveraging business and technological expertise to maximize overall project value.
• Stabilization of Production environment.
• Scalability and ease of use for new projects as proven with the two teams we had on the last two years delivering value aside of DevOps main team.
• Better communication.

What was the added value for Celfocus?

• Positioning in Safaricom following the same Digital transformation pattern with Agile tribes.
• Improved the level of satisfaction of our client as proven by the performance evaluation reports shared, with impressive Percentage Performance score results: 96.30%.

Who's the team?

Currently, we have in place two independent teams to address two different projects:

• Framework DevOps Team, with a total of 15 people
  • Kanban Team dedicated to addressing the business as usual (Development requirements + 3^rd line of support).
• Kanban Upgrade Team, with a total of 7 people
  • Kanban Team dedicated to addressing technical scope of Safaricom roadmap for 2024 (OM Upgrade and Siebel Upgrade projects).

Next, some of the pictures we took recently upon Safaricom visit to Portugal:

Upcoming:

For the upcoming 2024, we have the following main goals:

• Deliver the OM Upgrade project by applying the latest v6.3 of Celfocus Order Management product.
• Deliver the Siebel Upgrade project by moving from version IP20 to IP23 in a collaboration delivery model with Safaricom partner Oracle.
• Renew our contract with Safaricom which will reach its EOL by the end of 2024.