My case at Telefónica Germany
IFor several years now, Telefónica Germany has been promoting job rotation as a central training measure to raise the willingness to change, flexibility, collaboration and broadening of horizons in our teams to a new level and to be fit for the digital transformation with this agile mindset. In job rotation, two employees normally swap roles for 6-9 months, but in practice this often doesn’t work at the same time, as in my case.
I have been working as a product manager at Telefónica Germany for almost 20 years, have managed a wide variety of telecommunications services and products and love this interface role between (consumer) business (B2C) and technology. My great passion for technology has always ensured that I wanted to delve deeper into the technology areas of our company. A job rotation was exactly what I was waiting for.
In 2022, I had the unique opportunity to accompany a few colleagues from the Charging and Payment Solutions team to Silicon Valley as a B2C representative to coordinate details of our future charging solution with our partners Google Cloud and Matrixx as part of our fascinating cloud transformation. One of the results of this incredibly inspiring trip was that I am now doing a job rotation for six months in exactly this great, long-standing and very experienced team.
The charging system
The charging system is the central platform in our network that translates the use of our telecommunications services and products into euros. This is now done in real time on the Google Cloud using the Matrixx system that has already been introduced. You can imagine the existential importance of this part of our core network and the technological challenges the team has had to overcome and is still overcoming in order to operate the whole thing in the cloud instead of in our own data centers (on premise). Incidentally, the team has acquired the relevant expertise itself and, as we are pioneers in the telco cloud alongside other network operators, all other stakeholders have also been constantly learning.
I find this dynamic area correspondingly exciting and interesting. On the one hand, the charging system, on which the services and products that we develop commercially in the B2C sector are billed in real time, and on the other, our journey as an entire company into the cloud in order to become more flexible, agile and efficient for our customers.
As I am currently closely involved in our company transformation in my role as product manager and no one could take my place in the product management team at the same time, the job rotation was designed in such a way that I continue to work in my product management job for around 50% and in the job rotation for the remaining 50%. Synergies should result from the fact that during the rotation I primarily represent the B2C postpaid charging requirements from the transformation as a requester (product management role) in order to then coordinate solutions for this together with the charging team. This is all the more helpful as the online charging systems actually come from the prepaid world, but will also be used in the postpaid world in the future and the postpaid world ticks differently in many respects.
This constellation has worked surprisingly well for the most part, which is also due to the fact that I have flexible, understanding and supportive managers and teams on both sides.
So this job rotation is a complete success and I think the strategy behind it is working. We found the best possible solution from a technology and business perspective for a fundamental postpaid charging issue, which would probably have taken much longer without my job rotation, and the mutual understanding of the respective roles was significantly improved, which should also make future collaboration even closer and better. I also understood what the cloud means for our company in the medium term, both technically and economically, had a lot of fun and learned an incredible amount of new things. Of course, I share all these valuable insights and experiences with my colleagues on the business side so that hopefully our entire organization can benefit from them.
Conclusion
I can recommend this training program to everyone and am really grateful to everyone involved for making it possible. True to our brand promise “O2 can do”.
