Telstra's chief operations officer is leaving the job and retiring from Telstra in the same year the network has suffered a series of embarrassing and costly outages.
Kate McKenzie has been a senior executive at Telstra for nine years and has been with the telco for 12 years.
Since 2013 she has been in charge of network architecture and operations, and before that was director of strategic marketing and head of Telstra Wholesale.
"It has been a wonderful 12 years with Telstra and I am very proud of all the people I have worked with and what we have achieved together. The time is right for me to change direction in my career."
"I leave knowing that Telstra, under Andy Penn's leadership, has a great strategy for the future and with the company, its people and its shareholders every success", she said through a statement released to the market on Monday morning.
Chief executive Andy Penn said Ms McKenzie has been a "significant contributor to our customer focused culture and a role model for women in the organisation. I have appreciated her support and counsel".
Ms McKenzie's predecessor in the COO role, Brendon Riley, will act until the company finds a permanent replacement.
A company spokeswoman said it was Ms McKenzie's decision to retire. Her replacement could come from overseas or internally.
Telstra has suffered a series of network outages since the start of this year, including:
- National mobile network outage on February 9, which affected nearly 17 million customers.
- Another national mobile network outage on March 17, which led to a 'free data day' as compensation
- Nearly 400,000 customers losing fixed internet access over the weekend of March 20 to 22
- On June 30, last day of the financial year, about 20 per cent of Telstra's enterprise customers lost internet connections for seven hours after the IP network crashed.
Deutsche Bank analyst Craig Wong-Pan has a hold recommendation on Telstra with a target price of $4.85. Telstra shares closed on Monday at $5.82, 2 cents higher than the previous close.
"While Ms McKenzie had responsibility for the company's network during the recent outages, we believe she is well respected within the company and so we consider her departure a negative. We note there have been significant changes in the company's leadership team (although somewhat understandable given the CEO change in 2015), with nine executives out of company's 12 person leadership team having been in their role for [about] 1 year or less," Mr Wong-Pan wrote in a note to clients.
Unions blame Mr Penn's cost cutting for the outages, saying he has sacked too many people in the operations area who closely monitor network loads.
National president of the Australian Communications Workers Alliance, Len Cooper, says there will "absolutely" be more outages on the Telstra network this year.
"There have been a heap of technical jobs off-shored over the last year to two years," he said. "They have a problem in how to deal with the network and it is because they have let go expertise and off-shored so many jobs".
In particular the teams looking after software and data loading, which monitor whether a network can handle all the traffic, have changed from locally-employed technicians to a team based in India.
