The Upgrade Begins, Badly

Though the upgrade promised gains in speed and simplicity, getting there was neither speedy nor simple. AT&T Wireless's IT staff had to rip apart old links from the different legacy systems to the client/server-based Siebel 6 system and rewrite them to work over the Web. The back-end systems-integration work was so complex that it wasn't unusual to see teams of 20 or more people assigned to write connections for a single system, says a former employee. Coordination between the teams - the responsibility of the lead integrator on the project, Deloitte and Touche - quickly got out of hand. (Deloitte and Touche did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

"Everything was siloed among the different groups, and we all worked independently of each other," says a project team member. Teams would work on a revision to their piece of Odyssey, for example, only to find that when they finished testing, code had changed elsewhere in the system, rendering the testing meaningless. "In other projects I've worked on, the project managers would freeze code while the teams did revisions to their pieces so you could test everything against the same code base," he says. "I didn't hear of that happening on this project."

Meanwhile, rumours of lay-offs and offshore outsourcing began swirling around Odyssey. "[The rumours] slowed things down," says a former employee. "When stuff like that happens, people start looking for other work. I know I was looking for other work when I should have been testing."

Meet the New Boss

On April 10, 2003, Mike Benson, a 15-year AT&T veteran, sent a memo to employees announcing that he was leaving after three years as CIO. AT&T Wireless's Siegel says the 48-year-old Benson "decided to retire". Christopher Corrado, the head of the security solutions practice for Wipro, an Indian offshore outsourcing company, was named executive vice president and CIO. Before joining AT&T Wireless, Corrado had been CTO at two divisions of Merrill Lynch, where he presided over the offshore outsourcing of portions of Merrill Lynch's IT. Employees speculated that it was just a matter of time before offshoring began at AT&T Wireless.

"Corrado was the hatchet man - everyone knew it," says a former employee. "We'd see our people going into these long meetings with people from Indian companies. We'd see whiteboards that had questions like: 'What opportunity do we have to offshore/outsource?'"

Former employees say morale wasn't helped by Corrado's first presentation to the IT group, in which they say he proclaimed: "Come in every day and expect to be fired." Intended to inspire the troops to greater effort, the talk backfired, says another former employee. "We all came away saying: 'Who is this arrogant jerk?'" Corrado could not be reached for comment.

The Deadline Looms

As November approached, AT&T Wireless was one of the last industry holdouts opposing the Federal Communications Commission's new rule on number portability, along with Cingular and Alltel. The industry had succeeded in delaying the change since 1998 on legal technicalities, and AT&T Wireless was counting on another postponement, say industry sources. But on Halloween, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the appeal to move back the FCC's November 24 deadline. An AT&T Wireless spokesman told Bloomberg News that the company was ready for porting.

It wasn't.

Things were going so badly with the Siebel CRM upgrade that there was talk on the project of trying to roll back to the old Siebel 6 system before the porting date. "Two weeks before launch there was rollback talk," a former employee says. But project managers hadn't preserved enough of the old system to make it feasible. There was no plan B. Project members estimated that the team needed two or three more months of bug fixing and testing to get the system running reliably.

And the Siebel system wasn't the only thing AT&T Wireless needed to get working before the deadline. Wireless number porting required new systems that had to be integrated with the different carriers' CRM systems. Five of the six top providers outsourced the administration of the number changes to TSI Communications and used software built by Telcordia. But in June 2002 (before the other carriers had announced they were going with TSI), AT&T Wireless chose its longtime software and administration provider, NeuStar. Ultimately, this would create serious interoperability problems for AT&T Wireless.

AT&T Wireless defends its decision by saying that NeuStar was the most experienced provider in the market, having worked on landline portability in the early 80s. It also says NeuStar's software offering was more complete than TSI's at the time AT&T made its decision.