How we provided a 45 Day Rapid Discovery & Recovery programme for a global aviation software services provider.

About Our Client

Our client, a global aviation software services market leader, provides mission critical services and solutions to their clients. They operate worldwide in over 200 countries, and have over 4,000 staff.  

The client had a requirement to stabilise their IT production services and fully leverage the investments they have made in best-in-class Event Management technologies.

As part of that, they requested HJIT expertise to conduct an urgent 45 day discovery to the Event Management capability and initiate rapid tactical plans to improve the Event Management service quality. 

The Business Challenges

• IT Services are currently delivered out of India with limited best practice enterprise capabilities in place
• More than 20,000 alerts per month which is resulting in resourcing challenges in the existing NOC
• Volume of activity is resulting in not being able to identify the true and meaningful business impacting events (too much noise)
• There is no standard way of identifying and dealing with technology outages, let alone preventing them
• More than 10,000 incidents per month are logged by Event Management across business Services
  
• No unified approach to Alert Management across the company meaning that when meaningful Alerts and Events are detected, they are nor dealt with before becoming business impacting
• Inconsistent threshold definition meaning it is impossible to consistently pre-empt what is about to go wrong, before it does

The Harrison Solution

Step 1 – Initial Engagement & Service Discovery

• Use Case & Requirements (MVP) – Use Case development for initial Minimum Viable Product)
• As-Is Assessment – Audit of existing Service Capability, Maturity Baseline, Team Interviews, Stakeholder map and feedback sessions
• Understanding Service Drivers – Performance, cost, quality and stakeholders 
• High Level Current & Target Operating Model – Capabilities, services, organisation, suppliers and technology

Step 2 – Workshops & Design

• Target Operating Model – Event Management Operating Model mandated from the senior team to ensure the right people are focusing on Event Management duties
• Training – Creation and execution of a team training plan on ServiceNow ITOM Event Management module
• Capability – Introduction of an ITIL aligned Event Management capability 
• Onboarding – Integration with the Lines-of-Business so that Service requirements are mapped and a method to onboard a service into Event Management is agreed
• Service Mapping – Critical activity of service topology capture within the CMDB / CSDM within Configuration Management 

Step 3 – Implementation & Launch

• Implementation Planning – Full Service Readiness testing to ensure they go-live meets the agreed MVP & use cases
• Hyper Care – SME led hype care for highly anticipated launch
• Knowledge Articles – Full knowledge introduction and handover to cover all the activities needed to onboard, run and tune IT services in scope of Event Management
• Onboarding Pipeline – Agreed demand method and pipeline of IT Services to be onboarded along with the full toolkit to execute it

Key Decisions

• Service Metrics, not Server Metrics – The Alert metrics are to be defined at the Service level. A load balanced server down does not mean the service is.
• Alert Assignment, not Incident Generation – Alerts to be remediated by resolver groups get assigned to be dealt with rather than an Incident being raised.
• Auto, not manual remediation – simple, repeatable remediation tasks automated through MID server capabilities within ServiceNow.
• Monitor by Design – Event thresholds and remediation requirements are moved into the Service Design stage of the new services lifecycle.

Harrison Achievements

• Event Management Introduction – Rapid introduction of the Event Management Capability focusing on the clients MVP requirements. Roles and Responsibilities clear within the IT organisation.
• Thresholds Management – A complete reset in the approach to thresholds and what the client does with the important ones. Thresholds are now defined and more importantly, what is done when one is triggered.
• Configuration Item Coverage – Critical to success; a comprehensive Service Topology map created for initial services to enable remediations to take place within the Service Hierarchy.
• Service Alignment to Business – Unified approach to Event Management across Business Services & Products. KPI’s & SLA’s are now live within ServiceNow and the NOC has clarity on what is and is not impacting the business. 
• ITSM Tooling Architecture – ITOM Event Management tooling set up properly to work with the monitoring tools in place.
• High Level Road Map – Multi-year roadmap supporting the clients aggressive drivers to onboard the services into the Event Management practice to enable their first step along their observability journey

Outcomes

• Delivered a fully functional Event Management practice along with the onboarding pipeline and procedures in just 45 days 
• 75% reduction in “noise” by removing single datapoint thresholds 
• Implemented the necessary threashold guidelines to incorporate SLA’s and CI’s as part of onboarded Service Topology 
• 66% reduction of incorrect Incidents of services onboarded into the new Event Management capability
• Improved CI coverage: With the revised and accurate Service Maps in place we achieved 100% CI coverage for Event Management alerting 
• Significant improvement in IT Resource productivity

What Our Client Said: 

“We worked with the Harrison James team to remedy our Event Management operations.

The team came in and quickly got to grip with our challenges and got us in a place where we are now effectively executing Event Management. This now enables us to embark on our Observability Transformation journey.”

Do you need help with your Event Management Operations? 

Harrison are here to help you! We utilise the best practice frameworks across the IT Enterprise and we work across the full IT lifecycle. 

Have a quick chat with us today on 020 3667 3666 or send us a message at info@harrisonjamesit.com