“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” 

I am Madalina Cordea, and the above quote by Winston Churchill is my life mantra. Well, this, along with “only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”

I love my job because it allows me to live by my life mantras. My experience of working as a part of the PMO team in the STL UK Venture has allowed me to be a part of various exciting projects, both internal and external. I absolutely enjoy being a part of all the challenging projects that come my way, but the project that is closest to my heart is “Bhoomi’. It was one of my first projects and was my gateway to a fantastic world of opportunities and challenges.  

Bhoomi is an STL internal automation platform used in India primarily for FTTH and fiber rollout for projects and is based on the Tableau platform. This web application works as an online tool for reporting fieldwork based on three processes and is used to manage the project management side, running dashboards, plan vs. actual, measures and doing all the analytics behind what’s happening in the field. It offers various types of services like FTTX or FTTH for survey design and deployment.  

Bhoomi development is still in progress, and we are planning to integrate not only the deployment side of it but also to add the planning, survey, and design along with management to this application. The system, in turn, will help us understand and run analytics behind it to measure our progress, performance, finance, service level of agreement, and any targets that we need to achieve. Owing to its useful features, once fully developed, Bhoomi will be used not just in India and UK but every place where the FTTH and fiber rollout projects would be implemented and rolled out. 

Even though Bhoomi is still in the development phase, and we are yet to achieve our Eureka moment, we are all very excited to reach that milestone and are working hard at it. The biggest challenges that we have been facing in implementing the project are the time quotient, resources, and the overall unpredictable pandemic situation. However, this project is extremely special owing to the collaboration of the UK and India teams which are both fabulous. As this project is a collaborative effort, the team here in the UK conveys the ideas to the IT development team working from India, which adds a lot of value to each of the ideas owing to their knowledge and expertise. They also guide us to mitigate any risk for the potential failure of the system. 

The teams are hotspots of professional experts who are specialized in working with various platforms in the telecom industry. Both the teams are diverse in terms of their backgrounds and experiences, which helps us to examine, analyze and choose the best solution to make this project a success. This project would be unthinkable without the efforts of each one of the players in both teams.

I love coming to work every day as I get to work with these amazing people and get to be a part of such a fabulous working environment that is completely people-oriented. I feel lucky to be guided and mentored by the people who help me bring out the best in me.