In the previous posts, we discussed the first two types of BPPM customization: adding new features and integration. In this post, we will focus on the third type of BPPM customization: automation in BPPM operations.
When you build a house, the time you will be living in that house is much longer than the time you spent to build your house. It would make sense to add some extra features to the house during the construction to make your life easier after you move in. For example, you may want to wire for surrounding sound speakers and Ethernet during construction.
The same applies to BPPM implementation. For every BPPM implementation, its costs more in many years of operations than in a few months of implementation. It would make sense to add the necessary customization during implementation that will cut down the cost of operations. For every full-time staff you save in operations, that is about $100K saving year and year.
Although some automation for BPPM operations can be added after implementation is completed, majority of the automation should be planned as part of the implementation. As an example, I am going to share how our 'cell extension' product has kept large BPPM operations manageable with a small support team.
BPPM support team spends majority of their time to: 1) Gather user requirements on monitoring, email notification, and ticketing assignments; 2) Configure or customize BPPM to meet user requirements; 3) Optionally develop customization in dev environment; 4) Test configuration and customization in UAT environment; 5) Deploy configuration and customization in production environment under change control; 6) Set up blackout period for scheduled and on-demand maintenance windows; 7) Trouble shoot when things don't work as they should be.
Our 'cell extension' product is a BPPM cell knowledge base applied on top of BMC's out-of-box knowledge base. It includes all the common features in BPPM operations such as event updates, repeats, aggregation, delay, blackout, rewording, email notification, Remedy ticketing, etc. For PATROL and Portal events, no cell policy configuration or rule programming is required. For all 3rd-party events, you only need to provide slot mapping from the 3rd-party events by following our clear sample code as a one-time setup. As an added bonus, it also provides plug-and-play interfaces for 2-way integration with any 3rd-party monitoring software.
Our 'cell extension' product is entirely data driven thus it works for every BMC customer. It uses a few simple forms for user input. All these forms can be viewed and updated offline without BPPM access. An end user can fill up those forms with the help from BPPM support team initially. Many end users even choose to own those forms and put them under source control system. Through these forms, an end user can tell BPPM what events they are interested, how they want the message to be formatted, who to email, which group the ticket should be assigned to, etc. BPPM support team only needs to help end users to fill up the forms or fill the forms for them, check the forms for error, and load those forms directly into BPPM. And the same forms are used for dev, UAT, and production environment.
Since data input has been dramatically reduced, and there is no need to configure cell policy or develop cell rules, you only need a small BPPM support team to run a large BPPM operations. Troubleshooting will be much easier since all events follow the same flow. Human input error will be minimized when data are input only once. BPPM cells will process events faster since no event policy is used. A user requirement can be completed in minutes instead of days.
If you are interested in finding out how our 'cell extension' product can work for you, please feel free to contact us by clicking the link on top of this page.
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