Why roaming people SHOULD go to WAS

I hear signals from old colleagues that they are not going to WAS, and given that I have had this very fight in several companies I have worked, I get upset.

Let me elaborate on running cost efficient roaming establishment. It’s 95% about mail, using ready-made snippets of text, following a strict process. That is the only way to ensure optimal throughput in a pipe where you manage some 100 concurrent relations. (Can I add that using a relevant roaming process management tool such as MODS makes life A LOT easier).

But in addition, you need to meet people in order to create momentum in the relations that have gotten stuck. Either the relations which never happened as the other party never replied, or the ones that were started but didn’t result in a launch. You need F2F meetings. You need personal relations with the otherwise faceless people you interact with via mail. If you have a relation, the process afterwards is SO much easier.

Executing the face to face meetings bilaterally is quite costly. One trip with the overhead of the travel is expensive both in terms of time it takes and also in the incurred monetary cost. Going to places where many operators are present,  with the relevant counterparts, is by far the most cost-efficient way. This as you can have have multiple meetings in a short time frame at the cost of just on trip. From 1992 to 2014 THE event was BARG, and from 2015 onwards the event is WAS.

I get the feeling the roaming teams are paying the price of MWG, where management gets the perception that international meetings are all about operator representatives being bought drinks by vendors. This is very unfair description of the BARG/WAS event. It’s all about making concrete business and then networking.

So if your manager is not letting you go to WAS, it shows a disturbing ignorance of how one should be executing an efficient roaming process.  Please feel free to reference this blog post if you have the issue.