My daughter’s under-14 soccer team has recently started using a video analysis system called VEO.
The idea is pretty impressive. A camera is set up around the halfway line and records the entire field throughout the game. Afterwards, the footage is uploaded to the cloud, where it is processed into something much more useful.
The software follows the action, creating a view that tracks the ball around the field. Even more impressively, it recognizes individual players from their jersey numbers.
My daughter wears shirt number 3. If you click on number 3 in the menu, VEO produces a collection of clips showing the plays she was involved in during the game.
For a parent, this is obviously rather fun, but for a coach, it’s a powerful teaching tool.
Our coach has asked every player to review the video before the next practice. As my daughter and I talked about what she should actually be looking for, we came up with three questions she can ask about each play.
- Was I in the right position?
- Did I make the right decision?
- Did I execute it well?
It occurred to me that these are also three pretty good questions for telecom engineers.
1. Positioning: Were we properly prepared?
My daughter plays defense, and good defending starts well before anyone attempts a tackle.
Where is she standing as the attack develops? Is she goal-side of the player she’s marking? Has she noticed another attacker making a run? Does she have the right body position? Is she close enough to respond if something happens?
Watch enough soccer and you realize how much of the game is played without the ball. Good players continually adjust their position so that, when something does happen, they’re ready.
Telecom operations have a similar concept: preparation.
Imagine reviewing a maintenance activity that didn’t go particularly smoothly. Before looking at what anyone actually did during the maintenance window, ask whether the team was properly positioned for success.
Was there a documented procedure? Had it been reviewed? Did everyone understand the expected impact? Were backups available? Had dependencies been identified? Were the right people on the bridge? Were rollback criteria clear? Had somebody confirmed that the rollback procedure would actually work?
Good preparation doesn’t guarantee a successful maintenance window, any more than good positioning guarantees that a defender will win the ball.
But poor preparation makes everything that follows much harder.
2. Decision-making: Did we choose the right action?
Now imagine an attacker running toward my daughter with the ball.
She has choices.
She could attempt a tackle immediately. She could hold her position and slow the attacker down. She could try to guide them toward the sideline. She might need to cover another player instead.
Afterwards, the video gives her the luxury of stopping the action and asking: Given what I knew at that moment, did I make the right decision?
This distinction is important in engineering postmortems too.
Suppose an alarm appears halfway through a migration. The team decides to continue. Ten minutes later, the problem becomes more serious.
It’s tempting, with hindsight, to say that continuing was obviously the wrong decision. A better review asks what information was available at the time. Was the alarm understood? Did the team have appropriate stop/go criteria? Was somebody responsible for making the decision? Were warning signs dismissed because the maintenance was already behind schedule?
A good postmortem should improve future decision-making, rather than simply identifying decisions that turned out badly.
3. Execution: Did we do it well?
Finally, there’s execution.
My daughter might have been perfectly positioned and made exactly the right decision to pass the ball to a teammate.
Then she kicks it straight to the opposition.
That’s a different kind of problem.
The plan was fine. The decision was fine. The execution wasn’t.
We see the same thing in telecom networks. Perhaps the maintenance procedure contained the correct command, but it was entered on the wrong node. Maybe a configuration value was copied incorrectly. Perhaps one validation step was skipped, or somebody misunderstood an instruction.
Separating execution errors from planning and decision-making errors matters because they require different improvements.
- If preparation was poor, improve the procedure and pre-maintenance review.
- If the decision was poor, improve the information available to engineers and define clearer decision points.
- If execution was poor, perhaps you need better validation, automation, peer checking, or additional training.
Simply concluding that “the maintenance went badly” doesn’t tell you what to improve.
Watch the game tape
Professional sports teams have been reviewing game footage for decades because experience alone isn’t enough. The real value comes from reviewing what happened, understanding why it happened, and applying those lessons next time.
Telecom teams can do the same.
After a migration, significant maintenance activity, outage, or difficult troubleshooting session, spend some time reviewing the game tape. You may not have an AI camera following every engineer around the network, but you do have maintenance procedures, timestamps, logs, alarms, packet captures, configuration changes, trouble tickets and the recollections of the people involved.
Then ask three questions:
Were we prepared?
Did we make good decisions?
Did we execute them well?
Do that consistently and, just like a soccer player reviewing every game, the team starts spotting patterns. Preparation improves. Decisions become more deliberate. Execution becomes more reliable.
And hopefully there are fewer moments when you kick the ball directly to the opposition.
How Award Consulting can help
At Award Consulting, we help service providers plan and execute complex changes to their voice networks, including migrations, maintenance activities and improvements for network redundancy or resilience.
Part of that work is bringing experience from many previous projects to the next one. We can help identify dependencies before a maintenance window begins, develop and review procedures, establish validation and rollback plans, and provide experienced engineering support while the work is underway.
And when something doesn’t go perfectly, we can help work through what happened and turn that experience into a better process for next time.
Because whether you’re developing a young soccer player or running a telecom network, improvement starts with being willing to watch the tape.
