NOC OPERATIONS CONSULTING CASE STUDY How INOC Helped a Global Tech Company Shift from a Reactive to a Proactive, Scalable NOC Operation

Introduction

A large global technology company providing software and services for communications, entertainment, and media industry service providers sought to improve its NOC performance, efficiency, and scalability. The company’s infrastructure supported critical business applications and services, making the availability of its network a key factor in meeting business goals.

The company partnered with INOC to assess its current NOC operations, identify performance gaps, and offer recommendations to ensure the NOC could handle new workloads and meet evolving business needs.

Client Challenges

The company faced several challenges that affected the NOC's ability to maintain optimal performance and scalability:

• High employee attrition rates and difficulties in hiring and retaining qualified staff, leading to operational inefficiencies.
• A lack of automation in event monitoring and ticketing, resulting in manual processes that consumed valuable time and introduced variability in responses.
• Absence of comprehensive metrics and KPIs to measure NOC performance.
• A need for improved communication and alignment between the NOC and support teams to ensure streamlined incident management and service delivery.

The company's leadership recognized that these challenges hindered their ability to provide consistent, high-quality service to their growing customer base. They needed a partner to help them transform their fledgling NOC into a mature, efficient operation capable of supporting continued rapid growth.

INOC’s Assessment

INOC conducted a five-week assessment, including interviews with key stakeholders, data collection, and process analysis. The assessment covered four key areas: People, Processes, Technology, and a Business Analysis.

The NOC faced significant staffing challenges, with 90% of its team having turned over in the previous year. Attrition continued due to dissatisfaction with salary levels and lack of career progression opportunities. The team often struggled to balance training new staff with addressing the growing workload, reducing overall productivity and increasing the risk of errors.

We found process gaps, too. The company’s event monitoring process was entirely manual, requiring NOC engineers to regularly scan for new events, which increased the likelihood of human error. Incident creation was also manual, leading to delays. Escalations and updates were frequently handled via email and chat rather than through a formal ticketing system, resulting in disjointed communications and a lack of documentation.

Metrics were sorely lacking as well. The NOC lacked a system to measure critical operational metrics such as First Level Resolution and Mean Time to Repair. Without ticketing all actionable events, there was no comprehensive performance measurement, making it difficult to optimize and improve processes.

From a tooling perspective, while the NOC had access to advanced monitoring tools like Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) and ServiceNow, these systems were not integrated effectively. There was no automation for ticket creation or updates, leading to inefficiencies and delays in responding to events.

Solutions and Recommendations

Following the assessment, INOC kicked off a solutioning project and compiled the results into a detailed list of actionable recommendations.

Solutions and recommendations included:

• People and Training Enhancements: INOC recommended developing a formal competency and career development matrix to address attrition and retention issues. This included the creation of well-defined career progression opportunities and regular, structured training programs. Additionally, it was suggested to establish a group of Major Incident Managers to lead complex incident resolutions and offer long-term problem management solutions.
• Process Improvements: To ensure better visibility and accountability, INOC recommended ticketing all actionable events without exception. By integrating event monitoring systems with the ticketing platform, the NOC could automatically generate tickets for every event, improving documentation and enabling more effective performance measurement. Further, INOC advised automating routine processes such as ticket escalation and alarm correlation to reduce manual intervention and speed up incident resolution times.
• Technology Upgrades: INOC proposed integrating the MicroFocus Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) monitoring platform with the ServiceNow ticketing system to enable automatic ticket creation. Additionally, completing and expanding the CMDB was recommended to help the NOC better understand service impacts and reduce resolution times through faster fault identification and diagnosis.
• Organizational Alignment: INOC advised consolidating key teams responsible for monitoring, IT service management (ITSM) platforms, and configuration management under a common Service Operations leadership structure. This realignment would foster collaboration, reduce silos, and improve overall NOC efficiency.

Expected Outcomes

By implementing these recommendations, the company could expect:

• Improved first-level resolution rates through better training, automation, and process improvements.
• Enhanced visibility into NOC performance through comprehensive ticketing and integrated metrics reporting.
• Reduced employee turnover by offering clear career progression and structured development opportunities.
• Increased scalability of the NOC, enabling it to handle a higher volume of events and incidents while maintaining high service availability.