Vocus Cutover
Name: Vocus Cutover
Client: Vocus Group
Owner: Vocus Group
Site Location:
Completed: August 2019
Personnel:
Project Manager: Ian Pinkard
Site Manager: Ian Pinkard
Special Project Achievements:
Lightspeed completed the cutover with minimal downtime and disruption, solving issues which arose, under difficult conditions.
Quality Standards Applicable:
Specific OH & S Requirements:
Vocus Communications is an international telecommunications company and one of Australia’s leading telco providers.
Due to our on-ongoing works with Vocus, Lightspeed was asked to provide a quote for an upcoming live cutover of existing services and infrastructure to new cabling and infrastructure. Once all live managed services had been restored, the redundant cabling was also to be removed and disposed of. As these were live services, the works were requested to happen after-hours (from midnight onwards) and be back up and running by early morning to ensure minimal downtime for the end clients of these services.
Lightspeed held an extensive planning session prior to the planned outage, to map out all the changes and simulate the job. This allowed us to foresee any potential issues, plan accordingly and minimise the downtime for all involved. Lightspeed’s planning and review raised a few concerns with the design provided, which was discussed with the client and a new, more effective and efficient design plan was created.
The day before the cutover, our technicians were given the day off to rest up and ensure they were fully prepared for the long night ahead. Management set to work ensuring all final preparations were made. All materials and supplies, including generators, lighting, signage, barriers, equipment, food, drink, snacks and back-up materials for redundancy, were packed into our vans and ready to go.
On the night of the cutover, Lightspeed technicians held a pre-works briefing to have a final review and discussion of the works and expectations. They then proceeded to site and got straight to work. Due to the important nature of working on live services, Lightspeed had additional technicians onsite as a precaution and additional staff on-call also. Lightspeed technicians worked tirelessly through the evening to complete the cutover and at approximately 3am a small unforeseen issue arose, which our technicians dealt with and handled in a professional and efficient manner. All live services were confirmed back up and running by 7:30am.
A huge congratulations and thanks to our technicians who performed an incredible job under difficult conditions; your hard work and skills are invaluable. It was a fantastic team effort with a good result for the client, great work all!