Field note ·
How we treat missing PM files in a monthly pack
Late or absent performance-management files are ordinary. Pretending the month is complete is not. This is the rule set we print in the appendix.
A monthly pack for a UK radio or fibre footprint almost always arrives with holes. A regional OSS node missed a night. A vendor patch paused a counter. Someone exported the wrong RNC or the wrong exchange list. We treat that as a fact of the job, not as a reason to delay the SLA meeting forever.
Rule one: name the gap. The appendix lists dates, network elements, and which KPIs are incomplete. Rule two: do not interpolate a contractual percentage across a silent day unless the SLA text itself tells you how to do that. Most schedules do not.
Rule three: busy-hour definitions stay frozen. If the dictionary says weekday 17:00–19:00 local time, a missing Monday busy hour is a missing Monday busy hour. We will not substitute Sunday because the chart looks smoother.
Rule four: if more than a fifth of the contracted elements are silent for a KPI, the narrative states that the month cannot support a comparison with the previous month for that KPI. We still print the elements that did report, clearly labelled as a partial set.
Clients sometimes ask us to “just use last month.” That would be a different document. If you need a placeholder for finance, we can issue a one-page holding note. We will not quietly stitch a previous month into this month’s pack.