The customer's three-year contract for IT infrastructure support with the previous service provider was about to expire.
For that reason, the customer ran a public tender to find the next provider. ICL Services, which offered to the client the best value for the price, was picked as its new service partner.Key Challenges
- Provide 24/7 rapid response to IT service failures
- Build transparent and efficient control and management processes for the customer
- Improve the accuracy and quality of early IT failure detection and further improve the promptness of response and recovery
Service handover
The project started with the planning for taking the service over from the current provider. The project was designed for a timeline of 3 months.
This is when the core project team was built and knowledge transfer sessions were held with the current service provider. All sessions were videotaped so new project staff may review the videos going forward.
The service handover followed these steps.
1. Putting the engineering team together: the key job candidates underwent tough screening by the customer.
2. Knowledge transfer: to ensure the full transfer, ICL Services experts adapted the standard checklists refined over years;
3. Shadowing: a process where the ICL Services team closely observed the previous contractor’s staff on the job;
4. Reverse shadowing: the opposite process, where the ICL Services team independently performed all jobs under the close oversight of the previous contractor’s staff;
5. Final readiness analysis before commencing service delivery.
In total, approximately 350 sessions were held during the service handover, amounting to about 240 hours. 25 engineers were involved in the service handover.
Support phase
ICL Services commenced service delivery in BAU (Business As Usual) mode in November.
This involved the following:
− we set up a 24/7 shift rotation schedule,
− added on-call duty for urgent incidents, covering the entire technology stack,
− set up regular reporting to inform prompt service evaluation,
− agreed on a service/quality management escalation matrix so the customer may quickly engage with ICL Services managers at the appropriate level,
− launched a periodic user satisfaction survey.
The team currently supports:
− 1,500 switches,
− 290 routers,
− 220 firewalls,
− 5,300 wireless network controllers and access points,
− 5,700 IP phones,
− 600 DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunication) base stations.Additionally, the team supports server infrastructure numbering:
− 120 data storage systems,
− 500 virtualization hosts,
− 6,200 virtual machines
− and two backup systems.
Results
- We implemented the service handover phase successfully, seamlessly, and promptly.
- Reached our SLA targets, consistently scoring above 99%.
- The team processes more than 1,000 tickets monthly.
- We resolve more than 96% of the tickets we receive independently without involving the customer’s experts.
- We tuned the monitoring systems settings, achieving a 51% event reduction over 6 months, thus improving notification response accuracy.