Over the past weeks, I’ve been sitting down with heads of departments across the telecom space.
Not surface-level check-ins.
Real, in-depth conversations about what’s actually keeping them up at night.
And a pattern keeps showing up.
Every major telecom operator is in the middle of some form of transformation program.
KPN has LION.
Vodafone has its own.
Deutsche Telekom, Orange, and BT are all running large-scale business and IT initiatives, typically led by global systems integrators at the helm.
On paper, everything looks solid.
Clear scope.
Clear budgets.
Clear timelines.
In reality?
There’s always a layer of work that sits outside of that scope. And that’s where things start to break down.
The work no one owns
Across nearly every conversation, the same issue comes up:
There’s critical work that no one owns.
It’s not in the SI contract.
It’s not formally prioritised internally.
However, it still needs to get done.
And so it lands on already stretched internal teams.
That’s where telcos get stuck. Believe me, I’ve seen it firsthand.
The three gaps I keep seeing
1. Network automation that never gets prioritized
The SI is focused on hitting major milestones. That’s what they’re contracted to do.
Meanwhile, your engineers are still manually scripting the same network configurations week after week.
Automation is always “coming in phase two.”
But phase two keeps moving.
The cost?
Slower operations, more room for human error, and engineers burning out on repetitive work that should already be automated.
2. Real-time data streaming as an afterthought
OSS environments generate massive volumes of data.
But getting that data where it needs to go, in real time, is rarely treated as a core requirement during transformation.
So you end up with batch processes. Alerts come in late. Visibility is partial.
The cost?
Delayed incident response, poorer customer experience, and network capacity that isn’t fully utilised.
3. Out-of-scope work that becomes critical
This is the one no one plans for.
The SI delivers exactly what’s in the contract.
But what about:
- The security vulnerabilities flagged last quarter?
- The monitoring integrations that were missed in the initial requirements?
- The test management support needed during an unplanned upgrade?
None of it disappears.
The cost?
Internal teams absorb the workload, projects slow down, and technical debt quietly builds in the background.
What I’ve learned at Evoura
We’re based in Amsterdam and work exclusively with telecom operators.
We don’t compete with the big SIs, and that’s intentional.
Instead, we focus on the work that falls between the cracks.
The things that don’t make it into the original scope, but still determine whether a transformation actually succeeds.
From the conversations I’ve had and the work we’ve done, that typically looks like:
- Turning manual network administration into automated, proactive workflows
- Enabling real-time data streaming to improve monitoring and incident response times
- Strengthening OSS and ENIQ environments through targeted security hardening
- Supporting test management during complex OSS upgrade projects
- Building dashboards (such as SAP BO BI Xcelsius) to give teams better operational visibility
The bottom line
Your SI is doing their job. But their job isn’t everything.
And the out-of-scope work? It doesn’t go away.
It just gets pushed onto your team.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken from these conversations, it’s this:
The success of a transformation isn’t just defined by what’s in scope; it’s defined by how you handle everything that isn’t.
If you have network automation, real-time streaming, or OSS/BSS work that isn’t getting attention, and you don’t want to wait for “phase two.”
Let’s talk.
