Based on the lifecycle of the OPNFV Doctor project, this case study shows how operator requirements “on paper” have successfully been realized step-by-step and in close cooperation with upstream community projects into a mature fault management framework. A demo of the solution had been presented in a keynote at the last OpenStack Summit. The talk will describe how we have worked in the OPNFV Doctor project and will provide some lessons learned on this journey. With significant experience now of working OPNFV requirements upstream to OpenStack, we’ll share best practices for submitting contributions upstream, how to best communicate, and how to overcome the primary challenges.