A global, multi-billion dollar product organisation with hundreds of customer-facing digital products had grown largely by acquisition. What it had not acquired was consistency. There was little shared discipline in how products were designed, built or operated, and historically little focus on operational performance at all.
The consequences showed where they always show. High incident rates. Long restoration times on material issues. Repeated instability in the organisation’s most significant products, with major issues every year during peak trading periods.
Following one such period of instability across several strategic products, we were asked to find out why operational performance was poor — and then to systematically fix it, across the globe, as a service operations transformation.
// THE CHALLENGENobody could see how services were performing
The problems were structural rather than technical, and they reinforced each other.
- A siloed operating model, with little interaction between product management, engineering and operations — and no clear role for the service management function at all.
- No visibility of operational performance anywhere from engineering teams to the board, made worse by service reporting too complex to use.
- Partially implemented ITSM processes on heavily customised tooling. The usability problems suppressed adoption, which degraded the operational data, which removed the last route to visibility — and blocked upgrades.
- Limited estate control: immature monitoring, ineffective automated discovery, no view of end-user devices, poor configuration and asset data.
- A high number of uncoordinated improvement initiatives running in parallel, confusing teams about priorities and delivering only partial benefit.
"An organisation cannot improve what it cannot see. The reporting existed — it was simply too complex for anyone to act on."
// WHERE WE STARTEDA month of evidence, not opinion
We ran a focused, month-long discovery: thousands of data points reviewed and over 100 interviews held across the organisation. It is the same method we now run as the Digital Service Operations Healthcheck. The point was to arrive at a diagnosis the client’s own people recognised, rather than an outside view they could dismiss.
Discovery identified nine key improvement initiatives. We built a fully costed business case for an extensive service transformation programme around them, and it was agreed at board level.
We then mobilised at pace, with our people supporting the client’s own workstream leaders with directional advice rather than taking the work off them. Each area got a strategy, a backlog, a roadmap and a working group to deliver it.
// MAKING IT VISIBLEReporting people actually used
We restructured service performance reporting completely, replacing it with an intuitive, interactive, navigable dashboard designed for teams at every level — engineers through to executives.
Unique users of the metrics dashboard rose by more than 800%. That number matters less as a statistic than as a behaviour: teams began holding themselves accountable for performance they could finally see.
Around it we established a KPI-driven, benefits-focused approach to reporting, and led fortnightly progress reviews with executives. A comprehensive change management and communications approach — town halls, newsletters, intranet — built the momentum that carried it.
// THE OPERATING MODELA clear role for service operations
We developed and established a revised operating model for service operations, defining the role of service management and, critically, how it interacts with product teams. The silos had to go before anything else would hold — the operating model question underneath every service problem here.
Alongside it we agreed detailed engineering and quality standards covering the areas of systems development contributing most to service instability — and built a self-service tool so teams could assess themselves against the standard rather than wait to be audited.
// SERVICE HEALTHAssessing the products that mattered most
We designed and implemented an end-to-end process for assessing strategic products against operational health and the risk of missing business plans — then led the assessment of the client’s 37 most strategic products using it.
The assessments secured $25.8m of product remediation investment. The outcome that counted: key products achieved peak season volumes successfully for the first time.
// ESTATE CONTROLKnowing what you actually run
Configuration and asset management was transformed: automated service discovery established from ServiceNow, asset information quality improved, and administration agent coverage extended across the estate.
We built an innovative process to reconcile asset data across anti-virus, IP addressing, security scanning and patching sources — identifying several thousand at-risk and unmanaged assets that no single system had known about.
From there we led the remediation of technical obsolescence, with over 2,000 aged and unsupported software products removed, reducing attack surface and improving manageability. End-user compute asset management was rebuilt for full lifecycle visibility and rolled out to 195 global stockrooms, and the enterprise service management tool was de-customised — restoring upgradeability and laying foundations for integration across the estate.
We also insourced an ineffective third-party monitoring capability within two months, improving effectiveness significantly while saving over $435k a year. Getting the alerting itself right is a separate discipline, covered in our alert management maturity review.
// RESULTSWhat twelve months delivered
"Axiologik has been the best partner I have ever worked with. All of your team members have been super helpful and have added a lot of value. Very customer focused, very value focused, simply great work!"
— SENIOR DIRECTOR, SERVICE MANAGEMENT
