Service Management for Enterprises - October 2012

Service Management for Enterprises

Dedicated Plans and ITAR-Support Plans Service Description

Published: October 2012

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Contents

Introduction 4

Document Scope 4

Service Level Management Roles and Processes 5

Services Resource 5

Service Review Meetings 6

Service Level Agreement Management Process 6

Reporting 6

Service Management as a Service Program 8

Service Management Advisory Board 8

Service Intelligence 8

Customer Portal 8

Web Service 9

Incident Management 9

Problem Management 9

Configuration Management 9

Service Monitoring 9

Planning for Future Releases 10

More Information 10

Introduction

Microsoft works to ensure continued improvement and customer satisfaction with Microsoft Office 365 technical and non-technical support services through rigorous service management practices. These practices promote effective and efficient resolution of customer incidents—as well as the avoidance incidents and problems—through the monitoring and evaluation of Office 365 metrics and internal processes.

Document Scope

This document offers a high-level description of service management for customers subscribed to Office 365 for enterprises dedicated plans and for customers subscribed to Office 365 for enterprise plans that support the security, privacy, and regulatory compliance requirements for U.S. federal government agencies requiring Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and commercial entities subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).*

The document address service management practices in two main areas:

· Service Level Management roles and processes. The Service Level Management program used by Microsoft provides established roles and processes. Included are the assignment of an individual (Services Resource) to coordinate interactions between the customer and Microsoft teams, a formal process for responding to incidents, a formal escalation process for incidents that impact service level agreements (SLAs), regular service review meetings, and regular reporting on service availability and key performance indicators (KPIs).

· Service Management as a Service (SMaaS) program. The SMaaS program helps customers better integrate their on-premise operations with the operations of Microsoft Office 365. The SMaaS program delivers a set of tools and practices that provide customers with greater exposure to Microsoft performance metrics and greater input as to which metrics are made available to them. The program also enables seamless integration of customer on-premise processes and process interaction with Office 365.

In addition to this document, customers may also want to review the “Microsoft Office 365 Support for Enterprises Service Description” to learn more about Office 365 technical support, severity assignments and response times for support issues, and incident response management.

* Office 365 for enterprises dedicated plans and ITAR-support plans are delivered from a Microsoft hosting environment where each customer has their own dedicated data center hardware.

Service Level Management Roles and Processes

The Service Level Management practices used with Microsoft Office 365 promote effective and efficient incident and service request resolution by monitoring and evaluating service metrics and internal Microsoft processes.

The roles and processes that are used by Microsoft in its Service Level Management practices include the following:

· Services Resource. This person is a key customer contact who provides service account management for the Office 365 services that the customer has licensed. (For more information about this position, see Services Resource later in this document.)

· Service availability incident response. Microsoft has a formal process for responding to incidents that impact service availability. For additional details, see the "Severity 1 and A Incident Response Management" section in the Microsoft Office 365 Support for Enterprises Service Description.

· Service review meetings. This regularly scheduled series of service review meetings includes reviews of support services practices and processes and of how well support engineers adhere to these practices and processes.

· Service level agreement (SLA) management process. A formal escalation process is included to focus attention on service availability SLAs that are in danger of not meeting agreed metrics.

· Reporting. Microsoft provides reports of service availability SLA and key performance indicator (KPI) achievement in the form of a monthly scorecard that is available via the Customer Portal.

The roles and procedures are further defined during the assessment phase of the service delivery process, and they are reviewed periodically to ensure proper effectiveness. Microsoft reserves the right to make changes to these roles and procedures after notice and discussion with customer.

Services Resource

The Services Resource is the individual who helps coordinate interactions between the customer and Microsoft teams—including the deployment team, account team, support team, and other service teams. Where possible, the Services Resource incorporates their Office 365 responsibilities into the existing business relationship with the customer.

The Services Resource has the following responsibilities to Office 365 customers:

· Account relationship management

o Provides a single point of contact for the customer.

o Serves as the customer's source of information during business hours and provides customer feedback regarding Office 365 to other Microsoft groups.

o Assists in setting expectations in relation to the delivery of Microsoft Office 365 solutions and related support.

· Escalation management

o Assists the customer during core business hours with technical and non-technical support escalations, acting as the interface between Microsoft and the customer. (After business hours, customers should follow the support escalation process.)

· Meetings and reporting

o Establishes a regular schedule of customer meetings to ensure strong communications (for example, monthly business reviews).

o Provides standard monthly service reports to the customer.

o Collaborates with the customer to develop service improvement plans when necessary.

· Standard change requests

o Works within the established Microsoft support framework to coordinate standard change requests.

In all other matters, the Services Resource works with the customer and other appropriate Microsoft resources to develop a proposal to fulfill the customer's request.

Service Review Meetings

The Services Resource organizes service review meetings with the customer to help provide relevant information about service operations and to discuss any issues that arise. These meetings are extensions of the existing schedule of meetings that customers have with their Services Resource and the rest of their Microsoft account team. They provide the customer with a comprehensive view of the organization's service and software experience with Microsoft.

Service Level Agreement Management Process

The service level agreement (SLA) management process associated with service availability is intended to drive the delivery of Office 365 services at a level that exceeds the level that is defined in the service level metrics. The SLA management process monitors service levels and escalates issues through both the Microsoft and customer management chains.

The goal of the SLA management process is to resolve systemic issues with the operation and performance of Office 365 services by focusing executive attention on those issues. In addition, the process addresses any service fee waivers that the customer may receive for unmet service availability targets.

The SLA management process is invoked by any of the following triggers:

· An SLA item is not meeting the agreed upon metric.

· The customer requests escalation of an issue.

· The customer or Microsoft anticipates that an SLA item is not going to meet the agreed-on metric.

In response to any of these triggers, the Services Resource is notified. A review of the situation is conducted with the customer and an action plan is documented. If the situation is not resolved within two weeks (one-half of the typical SLA reporting period), the next level of management is notified.

This escalation process continues and gains more visibility and resource allocations as time progresses. The escalation process does not stop until a resolution to the problem is found and the customer's service is meeting the SLA metric. This process is identical for all Microsoft Office 365 SLAs.

Reporting

Microsoft provides customers with a monthly scorecard that reports on the following;

· Performance against the availability SLA for each Office 365 service.

· Key performance indicators.

· Key usage metrics.

Each month, the scorecard is provided to the customer during a scorecard review meeting. Included in this monthly report are metrics that have financial implications—for example, the number of mailboxes that the customer is billed for in a given month is provided. The specific report structure for each customer is designed by the customer and the Services Resource.

Service Management as a Service Program

Closer integration between customer on-premise operations and Microsoft operations has been a consistent request from customers using Microsoft cloud-based services such Office 365. For example, customers may have their own change management processes and toolsets and need to understand how Microsoft change management processes and tools will allow for seamless integration with theirs.

To better meet this expectation for operational integration, Microsoft launched the Service Management as a Service (SMaaS) program for customers subscribed to Office 365 dedicated plans and customers subscribed to ITAR-support plans. The goal of this effort is to provide customers with the greater visibility into the IT services that are delivered from Microsoft and provide a combination of processes and tools that allow customers to seamlessly integrate operationally with Microsoft. Customer feedback about the SMaaS program has been very positive since its launch.

The SMaaS framework is based on best practices as defined in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and ISO 20000.

The major components of the SMaaS framework are described in the sections that follow.

Service Management Advisory Board

The objective of the Service Management Advisory Board is to formalize the methodology through which Microsoft gathers feedback for the SMaaS program. Microsoft—recognizing that customers have a wealth of experience in managing at-scale IT services—invites customer representatives to participate on the advisory board. Ultimately, customers on the advisory board will set the priorities for new SMaaS program KPIs and tool updates.

Customer Service Management Advisory Board participants must meet the following requirements:

· Microsoft Office 365 dedicated plans customer.

· ITIL Service Manager certification (v2 or v3).

· Time commitment of 5-10 hours per quarter.

Service Intelligence

Every service data point—from consumption metrics to alert data to billing data—are part of the Microsoft service intelligence platform that is used to evaluate service performance. Through the SMaaS program, additional KPI and data points are added to the service intelligence scope based on customer input. Customers will have visibility into these additional data points over time. The Service Management Advisory Board prioritizes which metrics are added to the service intelligence platform and determines when customers receive visibility into those data points.

Customer Portal

The Customer Portal is a website that allows customers to view a subset of Microsoft Office 365 service intelligence data about the services they purchased. The data that is exposed on the portal is based on customer feedback, and portal updates are made on a quarterly basis.

The portal provides customers with access to service level agreement (SLA) data, consumption and trend data, incident details and status, and service health including potential and confirmed impact.

Web Service

The web service provides customers with a programmatic view into Microsoft Office 365 service intelligence data. The web service is the key to integrating customer operational toolsets with Office 365 operational data and processes.

Data exposed via the web service API is a superset of that exposed via the Customer Portal. As with the Customer Portal, updates are released quarterly and update priorities are set by customers.

Incident Management

Historically, Microsoft customers subscribed to cloud-based services have only had visibility into two types of incident data: support incidents raised by the customer and service impacting events. Through the SMaaS program, Microsoft has exposed more data about overall service incidents including “proactive, non-impacting” incident counts and metadata.

Problem Management

Microsoft has internally developed a robust problem management processes. Problem management processes follow industry best practices, and the internal tooling for problem management is fully integrated with the development and engineering toolsets across Microsoft.

Feedback from customers has indicated that they would like more visibility into these problem management inputs, activities, and outputs. Customers want to know: What are the problems that are being tracked? What is the status of each problem and action item? With SMaaS, Microsoft will expose more of that information to further allow customers to integrate their operations with Microsoft Office 365.

Configuration Management

Microsoft added Configuration Management to SMaaS program based on feedback from the Service Management Advisory Board. Specifically, there are two components of Configuration Management currently under development. First is the regular publication of additional details for the Desired Configuration Management toolset used by Microsoft to manage and control the configuration of components within the services. Secondly, there are thousands of configuration items that customers need to know (for example, "What is my Outlook Web App URL?"). These items will be accessible on-demand to customers via the web service in an upcoming release.

The addition of Configuration Management will address both of these components in the coming months.

Service Monitoring

Microsoft invests heavily in component, service, feature, and consumption monitoring. Through the service monitoring component of SMaaS, Microsoft will provide customers with more visibility into the monitoring improvements that are made and the improvement schedule. Microsoft will also expose more data about potential and confirmed impact events.