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Customer Pain Points

In a recently concluded pilot with a global cloud service provider, the IT Ops team faced strong pressure to resolve incidents faster due to stringent SLA agreements & risk of goodwill loss with customers.

Due to the complexity of their infrastructure, multiple teams of subject matter experts (SMEs) were often needed to investigate and resolve complex problems and urgent incidents.  This led to several collaboration challenges within the incident resolution workflow including:
 

1. Difficulty in reading & understanding long service tickets under time pressure – SMEs would generally update incident tickets & post chat messages, and all others would need to read and understand these updates to get on the ‘same page’.   Reading linear chains of long text in order to get the whole picture was inefficient and difficult to do under time pressure.
    

2. Inefficient handover - Hand-off during shift changes was tedious & very time consuming - new SMEs could take up to an hour to onboard. The team faced difficulties in explaining to others the current investigation status, work done & what actions were taken and why.
    

3. Lack of shared understanding - Incident response team members, managers and customers did not have a clear understanding of investigation progress and strategy. Manual status reporting to managers & customers was time consuming and distracting for investigators.
    

4. Inadequate knowledge sharing & inefficient reuse:
    

Tedious manual searching & reading of prior tickets & knowledge repositories was required to find applicable solutions, resulting in time delays & duplicated efforts.  This was especially true when expert admins left the team and new members with less experience took over.
 

Writing “post-mortem” reports and knowledge articles often resulted in complex but incomplete information.  Significant additional effort was required in trying to reconstruct exact steps taken for cause analysis and remediation, and their outcomes. Others had to read and understand these articles, and apply the knowledge at appropriate times, which was not often not possible to do under time pressure.
 

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smartQED Solution & Benefits

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In the evaluation, the unique Collaborative Investigation Maps™ and Solution Recommendation Engine from smartQED provided significant reduction in problem resolution times through:

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• Visual, in-context collaborative workspace that allowed teams to reach shared understanding very quickly
   

• Easy, automatic reporting for clear visibility of investigation plans & progress to all stakeholders­­
   

• Automated knowledge capture and recommendations (augmented intelligence) that helps investigation teams find cause and remediation steps for problems rapidly, reducing the need for resources and reducing the MTTR.