An operational plan example the size of a World Cup: Diego Camberos of Vodafone Qatar

If you want an operational plan example with genuinely high stakes, consider this one: a country of roughly 3 million people preparing for around a million visitors, with every match broadcast to the world across your network.

Diego Camberos is COO of Vodafone Qatar. Vodafone Group operates across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Oceania with annual revenues in the $45 billion range. Camberos has worked across the US, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, first for McDonald's and Burger King and then in telecom. Before Vodafone he spent nine and a half years at Millicom, running its businesses as CEO in Rwanda and then Senegal.

Ten countries, and how expat life actually starts

Camberos is from Bolivia and has lived in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Rwanda, Senegal and now Qatar. This is his tenth country.

His description of how it happens is one many people will recognize. If you are single it is easier. If you are married, the conversation is that it is only two years, let us try it. And then, he says, he has met a great many people who set out for two years and spent most of their working lives moving between countries.

Eventually it becomes routine. His family reached the point of having a checklist, knowing who to call about containers, and simply moving.

Getting culture right in a company with 67 nationalities

Camberos separates two things people often blur. There are national cultures with their own customs, and there are corporate cultures that differ just as much, from corporate to entrepreneurial, from risk-taking to risk-averse.

On the national side, his rule is research before arrival. Understand what you can and cannot do, because doing that demonstrates respect, and the understanding deepens the longer you stay.

His example from Senegal is one he clearly enjoyed. Seniority and age carried a specific weight, so greeting people followed a ritual determined not by role or position but by age and accumulated experience.

In Qatar the challenge inverts. Vodafone Qatar employs people from more than 60 nationalities, so a strong corporate culture is what holds the organization together across that variety.

The illustration he gives is the most useful thing in the episode for anyone running an international team. You say green, and you assume everyone knows which green you mean. Someone from one country pictures light green. Someone from another pictures dark green. Living across cultures teaches you to be far more precise, which becomes essential when you are building a culture rather than just giving instructions.

Asked whether there is a manual, he is direct: there is not. You pick up basics in an MBA or in communication training, but the rest comes from working with people. In every country he has heard the same sentence, that this is not the local way of doing things.

His resolution is respect the culture and establish clear rules and values that hold regardless. His model is McDonald's, where he spent nine years, and which he considers one of the strongest corporate cultures he has worked inside. The processes and training are consistent wherever you go, and that consistency is how the quality is maintained.

He sees Vodafone the same way. Take the brand's values and the way the company does business, apply them in every market, respect the local culture, and be clear that on the business side there is a defined approach.

The specific difference he noticed on joining was discipline. Vodafone runs everything through business cases with real rigor, where his previous company was considerably more entrepreneurial. He also notes the smaller cultural tells, like whether a request for information produces slides or a summary email, and whether emails run long or short.

His verdict on what to carry forward from Vodafone is quality and data. There is no negotiation about the quality delivered, and decisions are disciplined. He acknowledges this can feel complex compared with a faster, more entrepreneurial environment, and thinks it makes sense when you are expanding a global brand.

The advantage of being part of a group

Camberos is enthusiastic about what a multinational structure actually provides, and it is not what people assume.

The value is access. Whatever challenge arrives, someone in another operating company has faced it, solved it, or has a view. Vodafone shares practice well, and the work is adapting it to local conditions rather than importing it wholesale.

His examples are concrete. Germany's market is mature, particularly in fixed line. Portugal had a marketing team he rates highly and had done well in fixed. So when Qatar launched fixed services, they called both and asked what to avoid and how to structure it. Mature markets bring depth and complexity, smaller ones bring agility, and you take from each.

The connective tissue is meetings and relationships built through them, more of it through travel before the pandemic. His observation about how it works in practice: get someone's contact details, ask for help, and you get an answer. He points to Turkey's digital work and Vodacom's financial services, including M-Pesa, as places to draw expertise from. The only requirement is not being shy about asking.

What the COO owns at an operating company

Vodafone Qatar is structured differently from a typical operating company, which Camberos notes usually does not have a COO at all.

His office covers everything revenue-generating and everything that touches the customer: the digital channels, customer operations, enterprise and consumer. A CTO owns technology and the network, and the two work closely.

The results over the period he describes are strong. First quarter 2022 brought 25% revenue growth, 28% EBITDA growth and a 63% increase in net profit, after what he characterizes as a five-year turnaround.

Radical simplification

Asked what drove that, Camberos names one thing first, and it is not a technology.

Radical simplification, applied across processes, how the company thinks, the product portfolio and the approach to customer experience. He credits it with a halo effect across everything else.

The principle behind it came from a former boss: there are good businesses and bad businesses, so do the good ones and avoid the bad ones.

Alongside that sat real investment. The board backed building a genuinely competitive network, and the company launched services that diversified the portfolio and balanced the revenue profile.

The cultural half is what he calls being lean, expressed as treating the company's money as your own.

The design detail worth stealing is what they refused to call it. Optimization is not a program, because programs have a start and an end, and once a program finishes people conclude they have earned the right to spend again. So it is permanent.

What interests him most is how it changed meaning internally. Cost optimization started as something people perceive negatively and became a value. People are now proud of doing things better, faster and cheaper, which in a challenger position in this market simply works.

His framing of the mindset: if you were launching this company with your own money, you would behave exactly this way. So set aside the fact that a large global brand is behind you and run the business at the size and efficiency it should have.

The line they will not cross

Michael raises the obvious risk, using the Rogers outage in Canada as the example. In telecom, moving fast affects whether people can reach emergency services.

Camberos answers without hesitation. You do not compromise quality. There are standards to maintain, and within those you can always find efficiency, but the trade between cost and quality is not one they make.

His example is international calling. Qatar's population is largely expatriate, so international call quality is not a nice-to-have. Other operators might find savings there. Vodafone Qatar follows specific standards to hold quality, because the experience is not negotiable.

Turning a buzzword into a single number

This is the section I would send to anyone with digital transformation on their roadmap.

Camberos is impatient with the language. Digital transformation, agile, squads, scrum. His concern is what the vocabulary does to people's thinking, which is to make the work feel more complicated and more expensive than it is: replace the IT stack, buy tools, hire consultants.

So Vodafone Qatar translated it into a KPI. Reduce call center calls by 50% over three years.

His point is that you cannot achieve that without going digital, so the transformation happens anyway. What changes is where attention goes. Instead of buying transformation, you go after the product flows and design that generate the calls.

The framing he used with his team came from the group, and it landed badly at first. The business principle, he told them, is that we do not want customers visiting us and we do not want customers calling us. His team pushed back, and he clarified: of course we want them, but for different reasons. We do not want them contacting us because the product has a problem.

That reframing forced the work backward into product design and the commercial portfolio, so that store visits and calls became about upgrades and opportunities rather than complaints.

The rest is measurement. App penetration, frequency of use, recharge behavior, e-commerce. All of it measurable, and improving any of it requires the underlying investment anyway. Their stated ambition is that anything you can do in a store you can do in the app.

His summary of why the indirect route is better: attacking digital transformation head on, competing directly with digital-native players, gets complicated and expensive quickly. Breaking the customer experience into measurable pieces and improving each one produces the same outcome with a clearer path.

They measure every customer touchpoint, and within the group rank first on call center and near the top on digital.

Preparing for a million visitors

The World Cup section is a masterclass in what large-scale operational planning actually involves.

Camberos starts by dismissing the part people assume is hardest. Network capacity is comparatively easy, because you can spend against it: more sites, more connectivity. The difficulty is planning, and they had been at it for two years.

The specific pressure came from the tournament's format. It was the last World Cup to be held in a single country, and the only one where a ticket holder could theoretically attend every match, because the stadiums are close enough to travel between. That concentrates the fans rather than distributing them.

So the hard questions were about people. Where the fans will be, how to serve them, what products suit them, and how to communicate across many nationalities.

The scale figures he cites make it concrete. Estimates of 1.4 to 1.7 million visitors overall, with around half a million in country at any moment as people arrive and leave. Roughly 16,000 people landing at the airport daily. Forty flights a day from the region alone.

The comparison a friend gave him is the one that lands: imagine lifting Miami and putting it in Qatar. And it is not only the visitors, it is everyone arriving to serve them, plus accommodation, roads and transport.

The country-level response ran in parallel. Thousands of additional buses. A metro connecting the stadiums, already operating for two years, and his practical advice to take it rather than deal with parking. Doubling the airport while keeping immigration fast without weakening security. Agreements with neighboring countries so visitors could stay in Oman or the UAE and fly in for matches, which put its own demands on technology for facial recognition, passport scanning and visas.

5G, and the network the world watched

Vodafone Qatar rolled out 5G extensively, in a region where operators moved aggressively.

Camberos is candid about the difficulty. Their 4G network was strong and well understood, and the team knew how to optimize it. With 5G they had to learn optimization quickly, while the technology itself was still maturing and manufacturers were still tuning it, which made it a good example of operators and vendors working the problem together.

Two years in, he says it feels normal, with speeds reaching a gigabit, and Qatar ranking in the global top three for internet speed.

The responsibility that made this more than a consumer story is the broadcast. Vodafone won the contract, so the coverage leaving the stadiums travelled over their network.

The operational answer was dedicated infrastructure and staffing. A permanent team at each stadium around the clock, and network operations centers created specifically for the tournament and kept separate from normal operations, so monitoring was real time and undistracted.

Rwanda, and the thing he did not expect

Camberos's answer to the standing question is about arriving in Rwanda, his first time working in Africa.

He starts with the assumption he arrived carrying, which is that people outside the continent tend to think of Africa as one place, which it is not.

What surprised him was cleanliness and order. A capital that was genuinely clean. Never once being asked for money while living there. Local norms he connects to culture, including that people do not sell or eat food in the street because it creates mess.

He assumed the capital was the exception, and found it was not. Deploying the network took him across the country, including rural areas, and he describes bins nailed to trees so people had somewhere to put their rubbish.

His reflection is that if more countries had that discipline and that way of thinking, the world might look different.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Translate the buzzword into one number. Digital transformation becomes tractable the moment it becomes reduce call center calls by 50% in three years. The transformation still happens, because it has to, but the organization is chasing something it can measure rather than buying something it cannot define.

2. We do not want customers calling us. The most provocative sentence in the episode, and it works because of the clarification. Contact driven by a broken product is failure. Contact driven by wanting to buy more is success. Most support metrics do not distinguish, which is why they rarely change anything upstream.

3. Do not call it a program. Programs end, and when they end people conclude the discipline has ended too. Making efficiency permanent, and turning it into something people take pride in rather than something imposed on them, is the whole difference between a cost exercise and a value.

4. Be much more precise than feels necessary. The green example is small and completely convincing. Across 60-odd nationalities, ordinary shorthand quietly produces divergent work. Precision in communication is not pedantry, it is the operating cost of a diverse team.

5. Capacity is the easy half of a big event. Anyone can spend against a capacity forecast. The two years of work went into where people would be, how to serve them, how to communicate across languages, and how to run a broadcast that could not fail. That ratio holds for most large operational undertakings.

FAQ

What does a large-scale operational plan example look like in practice? For the World Cup, Vodafone Qatar spent two years on planning rather than infrastructure alone. Capacity was addressed with capital investment. The harder work covered fan locations and journeys, products suited to visitors from many countries, multilingual communication, permanent on-site teams at every stadium, and dedicated network operations centers separate from normal monitoring.

What is radical simplification? Applying simplification across processes, thinking, product portfolio and customer experience simultaneously, on the principle that there are good businesses and bad ones and you should do the good ones. At Vodafone Qatar it was paired with a permanent lean discipline, deliberately not framed as a program with an end date.

How do you run digital transformation without a large budget? Convert it into a measurable customer outcome instead. Vodafone Qatar targeted a 50% reduction in call center contacts over three years, which forced improvements in product design, app capability and processes. The transformation happened as a consequence rather than as a purchase.

How do you build culture across many nationalities? Research and respect local customs, then hold a consistent set of company values and ways of working across every market. Camberos points to McDonald's as the model, where consistent process and training preserve standards globally, and stresses unusual precision in communication because shared words carry different meanings.

What are the COO role responsibilities in a telecom operating company? At Vodafone Qatar the COO owns everything revenue-generating and customer-facing, including digital, customer operations, enterprise and consumer, while a CTO owns technology and network. Camberos notes this is unusual, since most operating companies in the group do not have a COO at all.

Also mentioned

• Vodafone Group and Vodafone Qatar, and the group's practice-sharing across operating companies
• Millicom and its Tigo brand, where Camberos was CEO in Rwanda and Senegal
• M-Pesa, the financial services platform Camberos cites as internal expertise to draw on
• McDonald's, his reference point for a corporate culture that holds standards across every market
• The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the first held in the Middle East and the last in a single country
• The Rogers outage in Canada, Michael's example of what network failure costs
• Diego Camberos on LinkedIn

Listen to the full episode

Diego Camberos on Between Two COO's

Between Two COO's is hosted by Michael Koenig. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.