Large, complex networks involve a significant amount of change on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. This is often supported by a small team who carry a huge responsibility.

These Change Management teams are commonly handling thousands of change requests each year, many of which will be Service affecting and Service impacting; from software updates, patches and releases, to configuration changes, and upgrades or replacement of physical hardware these must be managed within an operators business critical processes.

Mistakes, oversight, miscalculations, poor planning and unexpected errors can cause service outage, impairment or frustration for 100s if not 1000s of customers. For most CSPs this has a financial impact; not only do they end up compensating customers, but they lose the faith their customers had in them and they risk the cessation of their service contract.

Requests submitted to Change Management teams must be assessed to determine impact on services to customers. Manually this is a time-consuming task, fraught with risk and complexity and often un-orchestrated behaviour. Risks increase as, in addition to the volume of activities, there is always a volume of intrinsic knowledge and undocumented variations to contend with, alongside all of the documented, well understood business process rules.

Change Management Teams receive high volumes of requests, some of which are highly complex. A Change Management team at capacity through either volumetric pressure, complexity or both are more prone to mistakes. Whether this results in contractual, customer facing issues and obligations not being achieved, or worse still, a failure to meet statutory obligations an operators reputation is always on the line.

The customer needed Automated Change Management Requests to mitigate a significant percentage of the CRs, and as a result, the degree of the risk to the operator. Protecting customers from experiencing unexpected disruption or loss of service, or ensuring it met its statutory and regulatory obligations were central to an automation investment.

The customer had a detailed understanding of the automation candidate for CORTEX. It also wanted to layer in improved communication to the correct customers and stakeholders at the correct time. This was is critical.

Importantly, it wanted to minimise unexpected downtime or systems availability for customer impacting Change Requests. Automation was to support its intelligence around any service impacting CR.

CORTEX was integrated into the email systems (or systems capturing the change request) and from the subject identified which are relating to change requests. CORTEX determined the type and scope of the required change request from the information contained within or attached to the request. This is then correlated with the inventory management system to identify the impacted network components and confirm who the affected customers would be.

Adhering to the organisations defined CR processes, CORTEX could then send the required notifications to relevant departmental contacts and/or customer stakeholders.  This was to be fully auditable for governance and compliance reporting.

Under certain conditions, the system should surface a CR for a human to review. For the human-in-the-loop approach to automation  the same team would only need to review a small percentage of the CRs, freeing the team to spend more time to complex Change Management deliberations and decisions.

The customer was able to scale their Change Management team without adding headcount, a decision it was facing prior to CORTEX. The software increased capacity 600+ days per year, or the equivalent of 3x FTEs.

The aggregated response time handling of Change Requests reduced by 90% so service to the business materially improved.