Running the IT operations of a telecom company can be a nightmare, but thanks to processes and tools life becomes a lot more simpler. The business expectations grew manifold until recession shifted the focus towards cost-savings in every aspect of delivery.

In all operations, the business has expectations from IT and unless the same is delivered there is no value. Despite the best of technical teams being present, the operations was unable to satisfy business because of issues within the environment where operations and business were not in sync. Various support groups were working in silos. There were no common processes. The cost of operations were high, supplier management was poor. The operations team had no tool to measure their performance till few years ago.

Those were the times I started interacting closely with business through the delivery organisation to understand their vision and needs from IT. All their requirements were defined in a measurable Service Level Agreement (SLA). To be more measurable, central ITSM team and a common ITSM tool were formed and deployed. It touched the lives of every employee in the company. As a result, email crossfire reduced. Processes like Service Level Management (SLM), Configuration Management took shape. Trails
of training and injection of steroids in the form of process adherence led to operational excellence day-after-day.

We also formed a central monitoring team to monitor infrastructure, application layers and also few mission- critical business processes. This helped the support group to be more proactive, thereby improve availability of service and reduce the cost of outage. The whole bunch of IT devices were renamed as CIs and plugged into the CMDB and tracking it from its physical location to the due dates of the Annual Maintenance Contract relieved the pain not just for me as the operations head, but for my CFO as well.

On the data centre front, we introduced consolidation and virtualisation of systems that were with high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We also consolidated the support of the operations under a central team. This resulted in reducing the FTE count and added to the topline of IT and the organisation. Automation is the mantra stressed in every team meeting.

These initiatives gave leverage to in-source support from vendors, thereby reducing the vendor cost. This also helped team to improve the productivity, thereby being able to support more customers without augmenting additional resources.

There were too many platforms and technologies, which required many vendors to support them. This diluted the ownership of the vendors and helped them shy away from their responsibilities. To overcome this, multiple small and old apps were migrated into consolidated solutions. Likewise, the OS platform was also regularised to a single UNIX and Windows platform.

Currently, I am doing capacity planning to extract more out of the systems. I am also planning to chalk out an operations roadmap for the coming years so as to cope up with the business needs and meet competition.

There’s still miles to go, but I am happy about the miles that I crossed with vivid memories. I believe operations is a constant marathon: you need to keep running without losing energy. I believe it’s possible.