OSS Mission Control requires horizontal feedback

It Took Sheryl Sandberg exactly 2 sentences to give the best career advice you’ll hear today. I want you to ponder the following question for a moment, because it’s one of the most important questions you’ll ever answer…
The question was posed to Sheryl Sandberg: “What’s the number one thing you look for in someone who can scale with a company?”
Sandberg’s reply: “Someone who takes feedback well. Because people who can take feedback well are people who can learn and grow quickly.
Boom goes the dynamite!”

From inc.com.

This is the third in a series about contrasting the way NASA looks at mission control compared with a typical NOC (and the OSS / BSS that support them) [Post 1 and Post 2 can be found here].

NASA is constantly monitoring signals coming from sensors on its single payload and using that feedback to learn and grow (or recover) quickly. It looks at feedback in a horizontal sense, monitoring the single payload’s performance across a wide range of sensors / systems.

Our NOCs are also constantly monitoring signals, but due to the way our OSS / BSS are usually configured, they tend to react and respond in what I’ll refer to as “vertical loops” or “mini loops.” They look at silos (eg is a device in the transmission domain still performing within expected thresholds? If not, try to rectify it). Generally speaking, our OSS don’t tend to do horizontal feedback loops quite so well.

Network virtualisation appears to be having an influence on this thinking though. The orchestration mindset is taking more of a service / contract / SLA perspective, whereby if a part of the service is degrading / failing, then just shoot it and automatically spin up a replacement.

How many of our OSS are learning and growing from this concept? What are you seeing out in the field?

If this article was helpful, subscribe to the Passionate About OSS Blog to get each new post sent directly to your inbox. 100% free of charge and free of spam.

Our Solutions

Share:

Most Recent Articles

No telco wants to buy an OSS/BSS

When you’re a senior exec in a telco and you’ve been made responsible for allocating resources, it’s unlikely that you ever think, “gee, we really

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.