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Microsoft Azure Products

Microsoft Azure Products

Incident Management Process (IcM) is a term describing the activities of an organization to identify, analyze, and correct hazards to prevent a future re-occurrence. If not managed, an incident can escalate into an emergency, crisis or a disaster.

The first goal of the IcM was to restore a normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the impact on business operations, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained.

THE PROBLEM

Microsoft Azure has a few thousand services that are linked in a complex hierarchy within its organization across the globe. These services are used both internally and externally and their outages can cause major disruptions to its customers.

The current IcM solutions have a few issues:

  1. Lack of context about the incident
  2. No suggestions on how to fix the issues based on similar incidents
  3. No prioritization or severity levels
  4. No escalation of a incident to a crisis
  5. No visibility to the leadership teams 

THE SOLUTION

  1. Improving communications between teams
  2. Managing on call solutions across multiple teams
  3. Enhanced analytics to identify bottlenecks in mitigating incidents
  4. Setup operational rules & patterns that would monitor and inform of potential outages

MY ROLE

  1. Contextual walkthrough to learn about how Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) resolve incidents
  2. Evaluation of ITIL methodologies to identify best practices and UX opportunities
  3. Collaboration with key stakeholders and input from SME’s to identify Microsoft service processes and third party integration points
  4. Execution of complex interactive prototypes to simulate system interactions, incident resolutions, and configuration
  5. Worked towards a new visual language (Fluent) informed from existing design patterns
  6. Rigorous user research and testing to validate visual metaphors and conceptual frameworks

TOOLS

  1. Sketch (Wireframes & Visual Design)
  2. InVision (Prototype)
  3. Photoshop (Visual Design)
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