Read the following scenario and answer the questions given below:

In October 2016 the British multinational telecommunications company Vodafone achieved

an unwelcome milestone - the single biggest fine for “serious and sustained” breaches of
consumer protection rules in the UK. 

It was the result of a troubled CRM and billing consolidation project.

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom slapped a £4.6 million fine on Vodafone, payable within 20
working days. The fine was made up of two chunks - £3.7 million for taking pay-as-you-go
customers money and not delivering a service in return, and £925,000 for failures relating to
the way that the carrier handled complaints.

In a checklist of shame the regulator found that:

> 10,452 pay-as-you-go customers lost out when Vodafone failed to credit their accounts
after they paid to ‘top-up’ their mobile phone credit. Those customers collectively lost
£150,000 over a 17-month period.

> Vodafone failed to act quickly enough to identify or address these problems, only getting
its act together after Ofcom intervened.

> Vodafone breached Ofcom’s billing rules, because the top-ups that consumers had bought
in good faith were not reflected in their credit balances.

> Vodafone’s customer service agents were not given sufficiently clear guidance on what
constituted a complaint, while its processes were insufficient to ensure that all complaints
were appropriately escalated or dealt with in a fair, timely manner.

> Vodafone’s procedures failed to ensure that customers were told, in writing, of their right to
take an unresolved complaint to a third-party resolution scheme after eight weeks.

For its part Vodafone has admitted to the breaches. It has also reimbursed all customers who
faced financial loss, but for 30 it could not identify, and made a donation of £100,000 to
charity. 

The events have led to a £54m crash in sales from April to June 2015, and Vodafone said that
“continued operational challenges” with the mobile customers’ billing system that was
introduced in 2015 had led to the 3.2% drop in sales to £1.55bn due to a customer exodus.

Adding the £4.6 million penalty on top of that, we are talking about a £59 million loss
without taking the costs of the project itself into account.

Timeline of Events

2012
Vodafone first selected the Siebel CRM system back in October 2012, an implementation
which was intended not just to service mobile customers, but also customers for fixed-line
telecoms, data networking, TV subscriptions and other services.

Siebel CRM is a product originally created by Siebel CRM Systems. The company was
founded by Thomas Siebel and Patricia House in 1993. At first known mainly for its sales
force automation products, the company expanded into the broader CRM market. 

By the late 1990s, Siebel Systems was the dominant CRM vendor, peaking at 45% market
share in 2002. On September 12, 2005, Oracle Corporation announced it had agreed to buy
Siebel Systems for $5.8 billion. "Siebel" is now a brand name owned by Oracle Corporation.

Vodafone planned to integrate Siebel CRM with Oracle BRM (Billing), Prepaid,
Provisioning, ERP, DWH, etc. in order to cover the mission-critical Sales, Service and
Marketing operations.

It was a hugely ambitious migration and consolidation of billing and CRM systems involving
moving more than 28.5 million customer accounts from seven billing platforms to the new
system. It was the largest IT project that Vodafone had undertaken, 

2013

The migration and consolidation program began in 2013. 

2015

In April 2015 the migrations to the new system were completed. But in addition to suffering
from downtime, the system has also led to a flood of customer complaints about bills,
including some who have continued to be billed even after contracts had been cancelled,
others who have had their direct debits mysteriously cancelled, or have been shut out of
online accounts.

Vodafone was the most complained about telecoms provider in the three months ending in
December 2015, due network failures that meant many users could not make and receive
calls or were billed incorrectly.

2016

Telecoms regulator Ofcom launched its own formal investigation into Vodafone in January
following a spike in complaints during 2015 over the new system. 

Based on the results of this investigation the regulator slapped the £4.6 million fine on
Vodafone in October.

Questions: (Each question 05 Marks) any 8:

1. What went wrong with the working system of Vodafone?
2. Which departments will you hold responsible for this failure?
3. What challenges were faced by the company at the start?
 4. What are the demerits of shifting to a New System with respect to this case?
5. What is risk management? was it implemented properly in this case?(Give a reason to
the answer)
6. According to you what role does government body play in IT industry?
7. As a project manager what steps will you take to improve the condition of the firm.
8. What are the precautionary steps that you would have taken so that your firm doesn’t
face this problem?
9. What are the takeaways from this case study.