How You Can Find More Time for Your IT Ops Team

Sprint had a bit of a headache.

Sprint IT operations teams were overloaded with requests for new services from their development teams while trying to keep dashboards from turning red. When you're a telco, any business critical services that turn red is a disaster even if the baseline measurement is milliseconds. Service management is always the #1 priority which means new requests for services from employees will always make way to unplanned downtime. So how do you free up time from managing services to provide more services to your dev teams? Start with strategy, improve the fundamentals, and leverage best-in-class standards to map out your system management process. As soon as Sprint took a step back, they were able to achieve just that; which paid amazing dividends.

Orchestration was the Answer

As a result of strategic planning (side note: amazing excuse for team building), Sprint realized that what it thought was an automated process for OS patching wasn't at a high level of maturity.  OS compliance status information and patching was provided by one tool called HPE Server Automation, while a separate tool called HPE Service Manager handled OS patch ticket and status management (open ticket, current status of work, and close ticket). These two systems were not integrated, which required system admins to move between tools to launch patches. Sprint needed to document the end-2-end process and orchestrate those steps with software to ultimately free up some time to focus on their developer needs (not to mention reduce downtime and risk from change errors).

Happy Customer

With the requirements collected and process architecture mapped to the right tools, the orchestration workflows were developed and tested to deploy into production. Sprint’s initial release of HPE OO flows proved highly successful. Besides being completely automated, the workflows provided tighter security control of the root administrative password (part of the non-native custom build). As a pleasant surprise, Sprint even achieved several automation benefits from the HPE OO “Close All HPSM Change Tasks” workflow to automate the Service Desk Admin work. The Service Desk team was quite happy to give up that job, which moved the close ticket process from hours to seconds.