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Computerworld - LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- The thorniest question facing voice-over-IP project managers remains whether they can get their voice and data networking staffs to work effectively together on rollouts, attendees said at last week's VoiceCon 2005 conference here.
As VoIP technology gains in popularity, more companies are seeing the need to bring their telecommunications managers into planning and implementation discussions with their data networking engineers. But the two cultures are often still at odds, experienced users said.
Allan Rubin, manager of network engineering at Delta Air Lines Inc. in Atlanta, said a recently completed VoIP implementation serving 8,000 call center agents in 17 locations worldwide taught him that voice and data engineers must at least report to a common manager.
"If the voice and data groups don't report into the same place, you face a lot of high hurdles," Rubin said. "You have to take the traditional voice and data people and lock them in a room someplace."
Beyond the Trial Stage
Similar concerns about the difficulty of mixing voice and data staffs were raised at last year's VoiceCon . Users and analysts said last week that the continued focus on the politics of putting together VoIP teams shows that the technology has moved well beyond the trial stage.
PPL Services Corp. formed a team of voice and data engineers by placing the workers in the same office area with their cubicles interspersed, said David Stever, manager of communication technology services at the Allentown, Pa.-based power company.

Craig Hinkley, senior vice president of network architecture at Bank of America Corp.

Later, the entire VoIP group was relocated to a new office, Stever said.
VoIP managers also suggested setting up clearly defined roles for both sets of workers and even cross-training them.
Bank of America Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., plans to provide VoIP service to 180,000 end users over the next three years. Craig Hinkley, the bank's senior vice president of network architecture, said project managers have tried to ease the divisions between voice and data workers by creating VoIP infrastructure and application services teams that may include both types of skills.
At PPL, job duties have evolved into three mixed groups, with one for infrastructure, another for higher-level networking functions such as e-mail and voice mail, and a third devoted to network operations, according to Stever.
Expanding Roles
Several VoIP managers said they have found that training data networking employees to deal with end users is especially important because many of them haven't had the same level of contact with usersthat voice personnel have had.
Discussions at VoiceCon also covered topics such as whether job descriptions should be written so that duties are parallel and whether salaries must be at parity, since voice engineers have traditionally earned less than their data counterparts.
Janet Smith, a consultant at Janet Smith & Associates in Chapel Hill, N.C., said she combined the voice and data teams at an academic medical center where she worked in a prior job.
The convergence eventually "worked like a charm," but the process wasn't without headaches, Smith said during a "birds-of-a-feather" discussion at VoiceCon.
For example, the data networking staffers "never wanted to play by the rules," Smith said. "Some days, if I'd had a gun, I would have shot them all," she added with a laugh.

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