Nokia

There is an active push to bring a pocket of R&D-style engineering into the OSS (Operations Support System) group, building on top of Nokia’s NSP and Nuage network management/SDN (Software Defined Network) solutions.

In some ways, they have achieved this, as they have a good business writing NSP extensions and are building a library of customer-requested plugins.

Infighting among internal teams who should be working together to achieve a common goal.

Little agreement on what the common goal should be.

Lack of upper management support to connect engineers with the resources they need to do the work, leading engineers to take away from their engineering time to attempt to build their own connections, typically with limited success due to them being low on the totem pole.

Corporate reorganizations mean that support for the engineering-in-a-support-organization waxes and wanes.

Lack of technical standards / new hire pathways, meaning it takes a month to set up a development environment.

If you want to set up a pocket of R&D inside a services organization, please do a better job of supporting your engineers so they are set up for success.