Amdocs wins Capacity Media Global Carrier award
Amdocs’ award-winning Covid-19 BCP initiative enabled “business as usual” with no operational outages and able to support CSP projects as planned.
Not many Business Continuity Plans could deal so quickly and effectively with the unthinkable – a dangerous pandemic forcing a global lockdown.
But Amdocs’ was so successful that it has just won Capacity Media’s Global Carrier award for “the Best Covid-19 initiative put into motion during what has been a once-in-a-lifetime call for action”.
Despite more than 25,000 employees, and customers in more than 85 countries, Amdocs managed to maintain “business as usual” throughout – seamlessly transitioning the entire company (that’s 80+ countries!) to securely working from home (WFH) in under a week with no operational outages and able to support operator projects and deployments as planned. That’s a huge accomplishment considering the complicated processes involved.
Prepare, prepare (and then, prepare some more)
The scale and speed of Amdocs’ Covid-19 initiative was possible because of thorough advanced preparation: corporate governance teams were put in place from the start of the outbreak in Asia at all organizational levels to handle internal communications, employee-care, ongoing-operations, incident-response, risk/security management, compliance, customer-communications and business-continuity management activities on an ongoing daily, even hourly basis.
In addition, Amdocs’ had already strengthened its easily scalable IT infrastructure in advance to support a new initiative launched end of 2019 enabling employees to work from home once a week.
CSP deployments continued as planned
Despite the severe challenges of the global pandemic, thanks to Amdocs’ ability to quickly change its deployment model, 46 (!) deployments were completed in March-April using new methodologies, and best-in-class practices, collaboration and deployment tools to meet project goals. For example, hundreds of employees working from home worldwide managed to successfully deploy Amdocs’ suite on AWS Cloud in a DevOps delivery model for an APAC operator on time, from remote.
“In a year that has posed many challenges to the world, Amdocs' speed of response to COVID and the benefits of its program to its employees, clients and the wider community clearly shows how the company was able to quickly unite around a common goal and help in a time of need”
"We're here for each other no matter where we are"
Quickly recognizing just how complicated and stressful the situation would be for employees and their families, Amdocs’ Covid-19 initiative also includes the Virtually Together (“We’re here for each other no matter where we are”) website – launched in just one week.
A central point for information and support, it provides tips, activities and ways to remotely stay together and feel part of a community, ranging from IT-operational guidelines, training, family and community care, to health, safety and wellbeing issues. Amdocs actually launched two Virtually Together sites – an internal site for employees, and an external site for the wider community, including partners and customers (and which was visited by 30,000 people in just four weeks).
The need to reinvent global CSR efforts - and quickly
Amdocs’ initiative also included reinventing its Corporate Social Responsibility efforts to focus on new Covid 19-related activities and shifting from face-to-face to online volunteering and monetary donations. This was achieved so quickly that in just 10 days, it was already having a far-reaching impact.
In just March-April, dozens of CSR activities ranged from creating an app to identify virus “hot spots” in Mexico to help the government analyze the outbreak, to creating PPE with 3D printers, supporting small businesses (“submit an offer with your products/services and join us so we can work together!”) , donating 125,000 +meals to food-insecure families worldwide, to addressing the isolation of the elderly (e.g. hotline call center run by Amdocs volunteers helping with digital, emotional, food, medical issues.
“In a year that has posed many challenges to the world, Amdocs' speed of response to COVID and the benefits of its program to its employees, clients and the wider community clearly shows how the company was able to quickly unite around a common goal and help in a time of need”, explained Capacity Media at the awards ceremony.
