Digital Fibre

What it was

Contractors on France’s national fibre-optic roll-out were running a multi-region programme on spreadsheets, insecure FTP transfers, and long email threads. Field data showed up late, out of sync, and impossible to audit. We replaced all of that with a single real-time reporting platform.

The situation

The programme covered several regions and contractor teams, and reporting still moved by hand. Field managers filed updates however they could, back-office staff re-keyed them, and by the time leadership looked, the picture was already old. The real cost wasn’t just speed, it was that nobody quite trusted the numbers.

There were two problems to solve at once: pull inconsistent field inputs into one source of truth, and serve two very different people — a field manager on a phone with bad signal and no time, and an administrator on a desktop who needs the full audit trail — without shortchanging either. And it all had to happen fast, against a national roll-out that couldn’t stop and wait for us.

What I did

I directed the product design end to end: framing the problem with the stakeholders, designing both the field and admin experiences, defining the component system, and owning the handoff to the developers. The field experience became a cross-platform mobile app for engineers, published on both iOS and Android.

I interviewed people across the complete chain: network-provider managers, contractors, subcontractors and engineers in the field. Each group had built a reasonable local workaround, but every hand-off stripped away context. We mapped that real journey from field to office, found where information fell out of sync, and built one workspace that adapts to the user’s role rather than a pile of disconnected screens.

A couple of decisions worth calling out

One workspace, two lenses. Instead of two separate apps, we made one platform that shifts with the context — lighter and quicker for a field manager, full audit detail for an administrator — so nobody’s paying for the other side’s needs.

Location as the spine of the record. We tied GPS data to each project and plotted dossiers, incidents, and urgent actions on a live map, so the office could see not just what was happening but exactly where, and send help to the most pressing thing first.

Where it landed

One real-time source of truth in place of the spreadsheets, FTP, and email. The cross-platform engineer app was published on iOS and Android, field updates reached the back office as they happened, and operational efficiency and error prevention improved by more than 40%.

What I took from it

The surprising part was that the tools were not the whole problem. Each local process made sense on its own; the information became unreliable between people. The win came from taking hand-offs out, not putting features in. That’s stuck with me on every operations tool I’ve led since.