id, on-demand visits to central offices. However, the increased complexity and reliance on software drives an increase in tier 3 skills, where personnel are required to perform sophisticated debugging of complex software-based issues. Depending on organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities, the operations teams may also have a greater need for advanced software skills, and for policy developers who can use ONAP's policy interface to enable new automation. One of the bigger challenges for an operations team that spans the complexity of AT&T's net- works is to prioritize automation efforts. Effectively achieving this necessitates having a detailed understanding of the operations teams' work drivers, and where operations personnel time is being spent. This is often not easy to identify-however, it is vital to being able to effectively make deci- sions on where expenditure should be focused. Aggressively rolling out NFV/SDN technologies requires rapid development, certification, and deployment. Adoption of agile software development techniques [AGILE_1, AGILE2] and DevOps principles [DEVOPS, DEVOPS_PHOENIX] for ONAP development and through vendor engage- ments are key to achieving this goal. Tight collaboration and engagement between architects, devel- opers, and operations teams (both VNF and ONAP) is vital to achieving these goals; all teams must view themselves as being in the same boat and invested in taking a shared risk, calculated with due diligence. DevOps is also vital to achieving "continuous integration/continuous delivery" (CI/CD). ONAP enables the rapid deployment of VNFs; but rapid deployment of ONAP is also key to achieving the desired speed of innovation and VNF integration. Automation is thus also key to managing ONAP itself, including enabling rapid software instantiation and changes. Automation is also vital to minimizing human errors, providing a repeatable process by which changes are made and providing intelligence that enables ONAP faults and performance issues to be rapidly detecte