Experience

Proactive problem management across a managed customer base

Led In production Managed services

Designed the process, took it to senior leadership and embedded it with my team leads

Problem management only looked at recurring incidents, and it measured activity by incident volume rather than by risk. Weak spots in a customer’s estate stayed hidden until they caused a storm of incidents.

I designed a proactive approach and presented it to senior leadership and the other operational leads, who asked me to embed it. Each selected customer gets a standard health check across cloud, connectivity, data platforms and collaboration services. Every finding is classified the same way, whether it is a documentation gap, an active fault, a service risk or licence waste. Each one gets a named owner and a trackable task. Anything not worth fixing is formally accepted or escalated rather than left to drift. A check is not finished until faults are fixed or tracked and risks are recorded.

The checks cover monitoring coverage, backup protection, disaster recovery, security controls, patching, end-of-life technology, documentation and unused licences. Findings that repeat across customers are treated as systemic problems. Over time we automated the checks that could be standardised, including firewall configuration and security analysis, but I kept an engineer in the loop on purpose.

Across a large managed customer base, it has turned something that depended on individual engineers noticing issues into a repeatable process, while leaving room for the judgement that automation cannot supply.

Lesson. Automation can find a gap, but a person still has to decide whether it matters.