largely agreed but the real point here is that because of the expert design to resist change slashing headcount is likely to institute unintended consequences which are either unforeseen or outright damaging.
The restructuring of things and especially the retail and wholesale split (although retail isn't quite the right description) and the outsourcing of mobile network operations are a good part of breaking down the system and getting the sort of reductions needed but on the whole I fear there is a hell of a lot more that needs to be done - particularly to on the networking skills side of things
You would hope that they retain the right skills and potential to take them boldly forward to where they have not gone before.
But they have tied themselves into a selection criteria that is designed to force many of the older, experienced staff to exit the company via a retrenchment process. While it is true that some of them could be classified as dead wood, the selection criteria will take out many worthy employees as part of the collateral damage. Remember that they have to be consistent and may not deviate or make exceptions to attempt to retain anybody that does not match the criteria.
The other issue is the farce of "delayering" or reducing the levels of management. What they have done is to create layers at a very high level and then target the first line managers and senior managers and a few executives.
Then there is the fact that the majority of the management is located at their head office (80% ???) yet they keep cutting the management in the regions, where the majority of the customer interfacing occurs. Yet they motivate the new structure by saying that they want top management "closer" to their customers? How, I ask? Probably via a bloody call centre.
The biggest mistake Telkom made was to break up the regions and not have regional managers. With a regional manager they had a single point of control where decisions were made and customer issue were resolved by co-ordinating all divisions required to provide a solution.
The current setup has all the decision making powers in their head office in Pretoria. Every division is a silo and they don't talk to each other. To provide a quick solution requires days and weeks of fighting whereas it would have taken them a few hours had it been ordered as such by a regional manager.
So the big bang should have been to destroy the head office structures and push the decision making back down to a regional level. Obviously you would still have national strategies, high level planning, etc. at a head office level.
