Operations Use Case
A Story of Easy Wins
Leveraging existing technologies, we adopted an Agile approach to transform daily operations. We created an internal product that streamlined information access, boosted efficiency and supported critical business functions.
Chapter 1
Empowering Staff
If you wanted to know how daily operations were meant to run, you had to locate outdated, incomplete spreadsheets. When things went wrong, you had to rely on getting experts on the phone, in a hurry. It was time to do something smarter.
We set up a data feed from the workload automation system and created a simple view of the day's activities, blending a current operational status with historic trends and a schedule of jobs expected to run later. This solution was used daily by operations staff to monitor the start-up of critical applications.
Chapter 2
Combining Puzzle Pieces
There was a lot of information floating around the organisation, but the different datasets weren't being combined, so staff were having to manually cross-reference information, were slower to assess issues and were missing useful insights.
To address this, we built on our daily system activities list and merged it with operational checks data, Incident data and team documentation. The output was a simple screen that automatically pulled all of the data about a job failure and showed the expected business impact.
Chapter 3
Highlighting Real Issues
Given the size and complexity of the organisation, hundreds of new incidents were being generated every day, and it was challenging for staff to identify issues that genuinely impacted their role.
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We therefore designed a dashboard to give staff the option to view Incidents by team, business service or application. We also created intelligent filters to further refine the list of issues displayed. This meant that an operations manager typically needed to review
only 5 Incidents each morning, and business staff quickly identified significant issues.
Chapter 4
Maximising Value
While our solution was effective in spotting potential operational issues, its integration with the organization's IT Service Management (ITSM) capabilities was missing. Also, it didn't leverage the potential of its data for a more strategic, long-term view. To address these gaps, we made key enhancements:
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Firstly, we enabled our solution to capture operational insights and channel them to technical teams, converting them to ITSM items where necessary. This provided a tangible measure of the return on investment of our work, directly correlating operational insights with improvements in the ITSM process.
Secondly, we designed a dashboard offering ongoing performance insights to operations teams. This gave them the opportunity to optimise their work, better aligning it with the pattern of daily operational activities, and adding an extra layer of value to our product.
