ng in place a planned process for handling challenging situations where the level of service can be disrupted. The response team plays an integral part in this process. Response Team in Place One of the critical aspects of deployment of any network or service involves the ability to visualize how the product will work after deployment. This will involve understanding the process by which customers will deploy the product, including any qualification cycles and what is expected from the organization during these times. What levels of service are expected and provided will also depend on the type of contract executed between the entities and the service-level agreements (SLA) that are put in place. Let's look at it from the other side. If you are an operator, what should you be looking at before deploying a network? What are the critical questions you need to ask of an organization to make sure all the pieces are in place to help make a successful rollout of the product? You could start with the following: What are the capabilities of operations and monitoring that are provided by the network? What levels of service are ensured by the network? Are there dedicated network monitoring centers available? Are there ways to do live monitoring of the performance of the networks? Is there a process in place to ensure that a solution is found as quickly as possible without violating any SLAs agreed upon? What processes are in place to ensure that issues do not occur again? Is there a process in place to proactively discuss the health of the network and steps that can be taken to ensure continued acceptable performance in the face of changing requirements? CHAPTER 5 NETWORK ROADMAP EVOLUTION Note Aspects of network operations in regard to product features are discussed in Chapter 4. Assuming the product features are taken care of in terms of setting up appropriate operations and management capabilities, let's look at the aspects of a response team that will help the organization responsible for network operations run a succe