The application of policy in telecommunications networks is still in its initial stages. Since network elements lack native policy mechanisms, the impact of using policy, instead of SNMP or CLI based configuration, is not clearly understood. This paper presents a "Policy Control Model" and self-organising capabilities that network elements must exhibit to realise the policy potential for making service management simpler and more efficient. In this context, we discuss the importance of roles, propose a separation of functionality that makes policy solutions adaptable to diverse operational environments, and study the benefits of self-organising network elements obtaining their policy configurations through a stateless pull mechanism.