17 May, Friday reflections from the desk of CEO, Paul Bradbury
Last week, I reported that April was a record-breaking month for testing activity. Based on current trends, it looks like May will exceed that, with over 20,000 messages expected to be sent through the hub. While this is excellent news for validating the OTS process and user readiness, we still want to see an increase in the number of people entering the testing program. What’s holding you back from starting your OTS journey? If you need assistance, we're here to support you. If you would like to use a Managed Access Provider (MAP) to connect to the hub the MAP community is ready to help. You can find all their details on our website here.
We have begun applying our enhanced integration-test exit-criteria with CPs that have completed integration testing, and the feedback has been very positive. We want to ensure that you are ready to slot smoothly into the production environment when you complete integration testing, and these enhanced criteria are part of that assurance. We will be reaching out to more of you and publishing the criteria for the entire industry next week.
Industry trials are progressing well, with the staff trials phase now running in parallel to the technical trials and four new entrants starting their connection tests to the production environment. You can view our weekly progress updates here.
Our request for feedback on TOTSCo’s 2024/25 budget closed this week. We received a very low response rate, which I like to think is a sign that the industry recognises our commitment to maintaining costs at a realistic minimum while still providing quality service. Additionally, it suggests confidence that the TOTSCo board is effectively overseeing cost management. It is important for the ongoing operation of OTS that TOTSCo continues on a stable financial footing, and to that end we sent Q3 invoices last week. Your invoice can be found in the Account Management Portal under ‘Manage Bills.’ For those of you still to onboard and sign the User Agreement, you will receive a retrospective invoice in Q4 (see Bulletin 40).
With the go-live of OTS approaching and the increasing demand for support, I'm delighted to see our customer service team maturing and response times improving. Of course, there is still progress to be made, but it's great to see how far we've come.
On that note, we were pleased to welcome another 40 people to our information sharing sessions. Joan Whitehead, our Head of Customer Services, walked through the change and incident management processes we will be following when we go live, gathering valuable feedback from industry. If you would like to join a session, please book here.
That’s all from me this week. I look forward to meeting those of you attending the BT’s wholesale customer day on Tuesday next week. Don’t forget, if you have an engagement opportunity, please contact me; the team and I would love to join you.
Have a great weekend,
Paul
