Renewal Program

The GlobalNOC Renewal Program (GRP) officially concluded at the end of 2020. The program was formed in 2018 to take a comprehensive, fresh look at GlobalNOC upon its 20-year anniversary, reviewing and rethinking the organization so we can have an even greater influence and impact for our clients in the future.

The following goals, generated through in-depth feedback from our clients, guided the GlobalNOC Renewal Program’s leadership and activity over the past two years:

• Become indispensable to our clients
• Unlock the full potential of our people
• Become one of the community’s leaders in network automation
• Position ourselves to grow sustainably

The GlobalNOC OS

We began the program by developing what we call the “GlobalNOC OS,” to serve as our guiding compass for the future. The GlobalNOC OS defines the mission, vision, culture, and core value strategy that will guide every major decision we make moving forward.

Pilots in new organizational structures

Throughout the GlobalNOC Renewal Program, we engaged in a set of organizational design pilots to help us work more efficiently across GlobalNOC, to make quicker and more impactful improvements for our clients, and to provide opportunities for skills growth for our staff.

Three of our pilots are now permanent protocols here at GlobalNOC:

Software Superuser

This pilot brought together engineers from each of our network engineering focus teams to help make the most effective use of our network management toolset. This resource within each focus team builds expertise in our tools and helps bring that expertise to bear for the networks they support—both directly and by sharing what they learn with their team members. These superusers also work together supporting GlobalNOC-wide improvement projects, such as our process re-engineering project to improve our targeting of incident and change notifications, ensuring that the networks they support have all the pieces in place to deploy these improved notification capabilities.

Customer Relationship Manager Program

These new relationship management roles, each focused on an individual client, serve as a front door and central owner of the relationship with the client, which ensures our clients have an advocate within GlobalNOC who deeply understands their unique needs. These relationship managers also work together to provide common processes and systems to prioritize and find commonality among improvement requests from our clients.

Advanced Triage Technician

This piloted role as part of the GRP has now become a full-time staff position within GlobalNOC’s Systems Engineering group. The Advanced Triage Technician serves as a “front door” for systems requests, responsible for making sure that we have all the information we need to complete a request while also quickly routing the request to the best team for resolution. While we piloted this role across a part-time team in 2020, we’re excited to have our first full time Advanced Triage Technician on staff as of January 2021.

Staff engagement

We made strides in engaging our staff through new feedback and review processes, interactive all-staff meetings, and lunchtime tech talks. We additionally launched our effort to become a leader in network automation, initiating a collaboration with others in our community, and creating our core automation system.

Modernizing services

Through meeting with our clients in our first ever GlobalNOC Days, we identified the aspects of our service that were the biggest pain points and worked to modernize these things. In particular, we identified that our methods of notification were too broad and lacked actionable, usable information. So, we re-engineered this to begin providing information to users specific to their network services, with greater targeting and more helpful information.

Future client strategy

Lastly, we looked at our future to plan where we could most help our community and have greater impact for our mission, developing a three-pronged strategy:

In summary

The GlobalNOC Renewal Program was a vital and major step forward for the GlobalNOC—and we believe we can better support all of our clients because of it. There will be long-lasting value from the program in building the GlobalNOC OS, defining GlobalNOC’s core value proposition and planning for future growth.

Additionally, we created a team of leaders that is working toward the goal of making GlobalNOC a sustainable, fast-growing, critically important leader in the R&E networking community. All of this has succeeded in positioning the organization for continued expansion and evolution.

A new Leadership Council will serve as an ongoing internal decision-making body for some topic areas. This body builds on the model and carries forth the work of the GRP leadership team. This team will provide the continuous review and guidance for GlobalNOC moving forward.

Additionally, several ongoing efforts began with the renewal program but will continue. For instance, the Freeing Time team will continue to find ways to eliminate wasted time and cognitive load in an effort to optimize.