OPS01-02 Designing a Standardized O&M Organization

High

To achieve operational excellence, you need an O&M organization tailored to your specific needs. A well-structured O&M organization defines clear collaboration processes between teams—such as response times, service level objective (SLO), or service level agreement (SLA). It is also important to record inter-team communication to ensure there is enough data for future improvements.

For example, one common O&M structure divides support into three tiers: frontline, second-line, and third-line teams. The Tier 1 team handles customer service requests and resolves most issues at the first point of contact. The second-line team is the engineers who handle requests escalated from the frontline. They resolve known issues within the SLA and escalate software defects to Tier 3. Their responsibilities include managing alarms, incidents, and faults, as well as executing maintenance handovers, emergency response plans, and drills. Their primary goal is to ensure the stability and availability of the live network. The third-line team focuses on rectifying software version defects.

In a DevOps model, developers may take direct ownership of system operations and maintenance. A lean, expert enablement team should support continuous improvement and drive the implementation of process and automation tools across the organization.

No matter how the organization is set up, there must be an overall process, and each team and member in the process has clear responsibilities. Additionally, you use clear methods—such as collecting operations and O&M data—to analyze how team efforts impact business outcomes, prioritize tasks effectively.