Again, this week’s topic dovetails nicely with a lot of what was covered back in EA 873.  Last year I was actually able to put my modeling skills to good use at work.  I was working as an infrastructure IT project manager for GE’s Power business at the time.  In the months right after GE’s acquisition of Alstom Power and Grid, the integration of the two massive groups was not going so well.  GE Power at the time was ~80K employees globally and Alstom was right in that same neighborhood. We especially had some difficulty with a lot of the service delivery components for basic IT servicesm e.g. ordering a PC and using it to access certain applications.  The trouble was, while the networks were ostensibly integrated, due to them both using overlapping private IP ranges, it was really two networks with some really fancy DNS scripting.  To make matters worse, a lot of the legacy Alstom resources were not running in strategic data centers, but sitting at remote sites in a closet, on some goofy domain that was causing issues.  Like I said, things were a bit kludge.

The end user support folks were getting hammered, because of the nature of a lot of the issues.  Brand new PCs were arriving missconfigured or employees were only able to access legacy Alstom or legacy GE resources, but not both at once.  As a stop gap, I was tapped and put on a special project to get to the root cause of the issues since IT at this point was looking pretty bad.  (My first role with GE was with the client team, so I had some experience in the service management area).  Things got off to a rocky start.  Basically everyone was using the team as an excuse to skip over the service desk.  The service desk was having trouble with integration issues, but we found very quickly that EVERYTHING all of a sudden was an “integration issue.”  The sheer volume was overwhelming, but the powers that be, in this case the non-IT business leaders who were hearing the complaints and sending folks to us simply didn’t care.  They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand what was going on and everyone was concentrating on fixing symptoms rather then fixing the causes of all the issues.  I created the following capability model which very clearly outlined the various roles of all those involved and detailed all responsibilities from start to finish.  Got a nice pat on the back.

Stakeholders

• End User – The actual end users with the issue.  In practice, these are often executive level employees
• Integration Team War Room – The first attempt at a collaborative helpdesk containing contract resources from both GE and Alstom service desk vendors, specializing in integration related issues
• Corp Shared Services Resources – This includes the regular GE service desk as well as the level 2/3/4 domain specific resources, e.g. email, AD, single sign on, Identity Management/HR, etc
• PT SWAT Team – My group, comprised of various project managers from GE Power’s HQ IT function, with expertise in End User/Client and Network.  We have a higher level (in scope) of technical understanding and a much better professional network within GE Corporate IT
• Business Integration Leadership – This are business and IT leaders from both GE and GELA who are fielding calls from angry executives and put the SWAT team together

Process

This process STARTS after the regular service desk process has failed.  An end user who is not getting resolution to their issue escalates to the integration war room.  If they are unable to resolve, they create a ticket in a support queue spun up just for the SWAT team.  Often, information provided from the war room is incomplete or incorrect.  SWAT team works directly with end user as needed to triage issue.

Once issue is understood, SWAT team engages L2/L3/L4 teams as required while retaining ownership of case and acting as facilitator until issue is resolved.  Once resolved, the steps to resolution are documented and provided to the regular service desk and a RCA/status update is provided to the business integration leaders.  We will follow up with the end user in a few days to confirm issue resolution.

The SWAT team’s stated, internal mission statement, is to make ourselves as redundant and unneeded as quickly as possible by ensuring solutions are discovered quickly and documented sufficiently, so we can get back to actually doing our real jobs.