The human element of implementing AIOps

When implementing new tech, the challenges don’t end at tool selection, purchase, and initial deployment. You can have the best technology in the world, but it won’t help your organization if no one uses it.

Many teams look to AIOps solutions like BigPanda to reduce noise, improve workflows, and resolve incidents faster through AI and automation. Bringing in a new platform is part of the equation. The other part is organizational change management to support platform adoption. Maximizing your technology investments is significantly easier when teams support and collaborate toward the same goal.

Collaboration is key

Making changes is challenging, no matter the situation. IT teams working toward fundamental changes often need help with resistance, red tape, and other organizational hurdles.

Your approach to organizational change management can make or break a program, process, or department. Having a plan in place is crucial, so you’re ready if (or when) unexpected problems arise. Careful planning and contingencies help ensure successful implementation and your ability to meet goals and achieve return on investment (ROI) from the initiative.

Make communication a core priority. It’s critical that everyone in your organization understands the fundamental value areas for each team. Identify core team members ahead of time to help people work together toward the goal.

By sharing the benefits with your teams throughout purchasing, onboarding, implementing, and using the tool, you can reduce internal resistance and drive adoption to reach your goals.

Common challenges when implementing AIOps

Many organizations face similar obstacles —and organizational resistance — along the way. We’ve mapped challenges to best-practice solutions to implementation projects to help you achieve your goals.

Using event correlation to reduce noise

Reducing alert and event noise is the primary reason enterprises seek help from AIOps solutions like BigPanda. Reducing noise and improving data can lower ticket volume, free up operator time for higher-priority tasks, and improve overall workflow efficiency.

BigPanda helps enterprises reduce IT noise by 95% through AI and ML-driven event correlation. Correlation combines similar alerts into high-quality incidents, making them easier for operators to solve.

Common objections:

• It’s daunting to reduce large amounts of data. Operator and NOC teams are sometimes lost about where to begin. Tool admins may find it overwhelming to identify what truly is noise.
• Operators and NOC teams may have to adjust to no longer seeing familiar alerts now addressed by event correlation. Tool owners may feel they’re losing visibility if they’re not involved in the correlation setup.

Solution: Make sure project leaders communicate with the right people, whether NOC team managers or tool owners. Start by gathering stakeholders, observability admins, and issue-resolution teams to map out a process for tackling a large amount of noise. Ensure the plan has achievable goals, addresses the company’s most critical needs, and incorporates automation to build a foundation for better alerting.

Noise reduction is a significant initiative. It’s essential to help teams focus on the end goal and benefits, including:

• Reduced on-call fatigue
• Cleaner source data
• Faster and more accurate triage

“Within two weeks, we had a substantial reduction in alerts — and better alerts.”

Dan Bartram
Head of Automation and Monitoring, Gamma Communications

Automating processes and using AI

Incorporating GenAI and AI automation into existing processes and workflows is a hot topic in enterprise IT. With ITOps, AI can translate high volumes of data from multiple services into actionable insights, improving overall operational efficiency and quality of work. New technologies often face adoption challenges because of various roadblocks.

Common objections: Process roadblocks often revolve around security and legacy processes. Team members may have concerns about AI replacing jobs and resistance to change.

Solution: When addressing security and legal elements, involve all necessary parties to discuss the effects of process changes. This collaboration can help resolve legal issues faster.

When dealing with team members resisting change, remind team leaders and operators of the ways AI and automation can directly benefit their daily work. Emphasize that although learning a new process can be frustrating, they’ll benefit directly from the effort. For example, AI and automation can help:

• Reduce manual investigation by surfacing historical incident context
• Minimize clerical work, such as writing post-mortem documents
• Speed assessment and improve performance by customizing incident tags with business context and metrics
• Improve job satisfaction for response teams

“BigPanda is bringing work-life balance to the entire organization. Everyone strives for that, but this has really helped us to achieve that. We are seeing fewer outages because our NOC can now truly get ahead of them.”

Priscilliano Flores
Staff Software Systems Engineer, Sony Interactive Entertainment

Reducing time to resolution

Mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) directly affects customer satisfaction, making it a critical metric to monitor and improve upon. Reducing MTTR isn’t easy, which is another reason IT organizations look to AIOps for help. By reducing MTTR by 50% or more, BigPanda can enhance the performance and availability of critical business applications.

Common objections: While reducing MTTR offers a considerable benefit, it often requires significant process shifts, such as eliminating manual workflows. Learning a new tool while maintaining current processes can be time-consuming for operators.

Your solution: To support a smooth transition and fast time-to-value, acknowledge the challenge of learning a new tool during onboarding. Share metrics like improved detection and response times with end-user groups to ensure everyone working on implementing the new processes has a clear understanding of the impact.

BigPanda offers many resources, including a user community, BigPanda University, comprehensive product documentation, and professional services.

“BigPanda helps us detect incidents and uncover probable root cause in real time, which has significantly reduced our MTTR by 78%, from 25 hours to 5.5 hours per incident.”

Michael Lorenzo
Senior Director for the Global NOC, FreeWheel

Next steps

Organizational change management is a major initiative for enterprise IT teams. BigPanda customers have successfully used these best practices to implement AIOps and make process changes, resulting in noise reduction, operational efficiency, and faster time-to-issue resolution.