Engagement Retrospective: Northstar Telecom Hybrid POC
Based on: Engagement Retrospective Template
Date: 2026-05-01
Duration: 2026-04-01 to 2026-04-30
Type: POC
Environment: Hybrid
Summary
Northstar Telecom completed a hybrid POC connecting an on-prem Kubernetes lab to cloud-hosted control services. The POC met its primary success criteria for connectivity, identity integration, and telemetry ingestion, but firewall approval delays compressed the final validation window.
What Went Well
- Weekly customer-facing status emails kept the platform, network, and operations teams aligned.
- The early environment validation checklist surfaced DNS and certificate gaps before deployment week.
- Using sanitized telemetry data let the customer validate workflows without waiting for production data approvals.
What Could Have Gone Better
- Firewall requests were submitted after kickoff instead of during pre-kickoff planning.
- The runbook owner was unclear until the final week.
- Load testing depended on a single network engineer being available for packet capture validation.
Root Causes
- We treated network approvals as implementation tasks instead of long-lead prerequisites.
- Success criteria named technical outcomes but did not assign operational artifact owners.
- The customer had separate platform and network teams, but our project plan assumed one infrastructure workstream.
Action Items
| Action | Apply To |
|---|---|
| Add firewall and DNS approval dates to the POC plan before kickoff. | Hybrid and firewall-restricted POCs |
| Assign an owner for each operational artifact during kickoff. | All implementations |
| Identify backup approvers for network validation tasks. | Telecom and other matrixed infrastructure teams |
Artifacts Worth Saving
- Sanitized telemetry replay script used for ingestion validation.
- Hybrid connectivity test checklist.
- Customer-facing runbook outline for operations handoff.
Notes
The customer responded well to concise written summaries with explicit owner and due-date fields. Continue using a weekly email cadence even when Slack is active.