We opened a depot in the north west in April. The property team had been working on it since the previous autumn, the lease was signed in February, and my department was told twelve days before the first delivery arrived.
A leased line to that address is quoted at sixty to ninety working days, and nothing anybody says changes it. So the site traded for four months on a pair of bonded mobile routers, at nine hundred pounds a month against the two hundred and thirty a circuit would have cost. The handheld scanners worked when the yard was quiet and stopped when a curtainsider parked between the antenna and the mast, so the first three weeks of picking were done on paper and keyed in afterwards by two agency staff. None of that was a fault anybody could have fixed in the moment. It was a lead time meeting a date fixed before we were in the conversation.
It was not the first time. In three years we have opened six sites and closed four, and we were told late on every one. In one closure we carried on paying for a circuit into an empty building for fourteen months, because cancelling it is my department's job and nobody thought to tell us the building had gone.
The cause is structural. Property, operations and technology sit in three different approval chains. The capital paper for a new site itemises racking, flooring, signage and fit out, and carries a line called IT at a round number invented by somebody outside my department.
So we published a standard site kit with a real price and lead time, so the number in the paper is now ours. I am a named signatory on the site opening and closing checklists. We order circuits at heads of terms rather than at completion and accept that we will occasionally pay a cancellation fee, having now paid one of four hundred pounds against four months of mobile data. Three sets of mobile failover kit sit in stock so a site can trade from its first morning. And circuits are reconciled against the site list monthly, which found two we were renting for buildings we had left.
A building takes nine months to find and a fortnight to fit out. The connection into it takes three, and no plan I have ever been handed started there.
– Serguey Shinder
Top comments (0)