Summary
Mastek partnered with a non-profit healthcare organization to help improve infrastructure stability, platform availability, and the help desk experience for end users. By providing expert managed services and a follow-the-sun co-sourced approach, Mastek is helping the company’s infrastructure team overcome staffing challenges and ensure the resources needed to serve all stakeholders effectively.
Background
Challenge
The IT infrastructure team is tasked with supporting the company’s platforms, servers, storage, data centers, networks, and public cloud initiatives, along with all employee laptops, PCs, and virtual desktops. It’s a major undertaking that requires 24/7 staffing, which is difficult and costly to accomplish in the current business environment.
The company was struggling to staff the infrastructure operations function around-the-clock internally, as the role required rotating 10-hour shifts to cover nights, weekends, and holidays. The inevitable turnover stressed an already-stretched team, while high overtime rates strained the budget. The platform group faced similar challenges in responding to IT service tickets. Since the client only staffed the platform help desk during typical US business hours, throughput suffered, tickets backed up, and issues sometimes went unresolved for days. With no overnight coverage, a platform failure that occurred during off-hours didn’t get attention until the morning, hindering system availability.
The service desk that provides technical support for employees and contractors also found it difficult to meet stakeholder needs. The client was using a third-party vendor for 24/7 help desk overage but found the service quality sub-par. Bringing the function in-house didn’t solve the problem, however, as it was tough to staff it sufficiently to deliver timely, reliable support.
- Talent shortages hindered running a 24/7 operation.
- Staffing after-hours internally proved costly.
- Off-hours platform problems hampered availability.
Solution
The company determined that an offshore arrangement would prove the best way to obtain qualified IT talent to provide off-hours support and services, at a more reasonable cost than hiring US employees for comparable roles. The organization already enjoyed a strong relationship with Mastek and was experiencing positive results across several initiatives, including a Salesforce implementation and legacy integration project within the Medicare Advantage group. With no need to look further, the company contracted with Mastek for several initiatives implemented in a phased approach.
The client began working with Mastek in January 2023 for help desk support, then added infrastructure management and monitoring on a managed services basis a few months later, followed by service desk support for the platform group. Mastek provides IT expertise and staff resources on a subscription basis that allows the client to plan for predictable expenses, with the flexibility to scale up or down as needs and priorities change.
Improving Service with a Follow-the-Sun Model
- Managed services for infrastructure management and monitoring.
- Service desk resources for platform group and end user help desk.
Mastek provides the client with help desk support through a secure offshore delivery center (ODC) model based out of our India offices. The ODC model is built on many years of experience delivering these support services and is designed to ensure we meet both the specific needs of each organization and the stringent compliance requirements of the US healthcare industry. The Mastek team augments the client’s help desk resources using a follow-the-sun, co-sourced approach: The internal team hands off responsibility for end user support to Mastek at the end of the US business day, then Mastek hands the reins back to the client at the start of the US business day. This model ensures the client always has adequate resources to field questions and resolve technical issues reported by internal employees and contractors, even during off-hours.
Along with focusing on the time-bound service level agreements (SLAs) typical of an outsourced help desk arrangement, such as call wait time and first-call resolution, Mastek provides additional value by sharing expertise in ways that improve service delivery. For example, the team recommended and implemented a self-service password reset process for high Active Directory password reset requests, reducing administrative work. Mastek also simplified onboarding new call center agents by eliminating the need for managers to raise multiple catalog tasks, while making it easier to validate agent ITS between two internal systems.
Keeping the Infrastructure Up and Running
With the internal service desk functioning more reliably, the organization next turned to improving infrastructure support. Mastek now monitors and manages the company’s core infrastructure through a team of IT experts who ensure smooth operation of the payer’s multitude of systems and networks. Using tools like Dynatrace and Splunk for speedy notification and resolution of outages, along with an effective issue escalation procedure, Mastek helps maintain high availability of the company’s critical infrastructure components.
Mastek’s after-hours infrastructure monitoring services proved crucial during the July 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Like many organizations, the client found thousands of its servers knocked out when CrowdStrike pushed out a routine Windows software update with a logic error. Within minutes of the 10:15 pm update, Mastek discovered the issue and notified the client, spurring our collective teams into action. Together we worked through the night to diagnose the problem, begin resolving it, and implement measures to simultaneously protect the client’s core systems. Thanks to this swift and strategic response, 99% of the company’s production systems were restored before the start of business the next morning, even as many of its vendors were still down.
Additionally, Mastek has enhanced the client’s after-hours infrastructure monitoring through a tool that provides more robust information, including CPU resource monitoring, last successful file transfer, active Bp count, lock manager, and DB blocking alerts.
Tackling Platform Support Throughput
Gaining a True Service Partner
Throughout this service evolution, the client’s infrastructure leader appreciated that the Mastek leadership team was involved at a deeper level than he’d ever experienced with a vendor. Our leaders became intimately engaged to ensure the program’s success, accelerating the process of standing up the new service arrangement and getting the necessary Mastek resources hired and onboarded.
The client views Mastek as a partner that is committed to growing with their organization and constantly evolving, building on a successful track record to drive continuous improvement. They believe Mastek has brought together the right people, practices, and processes, along with a focus on innovation, an eagerness and willingness to learn the business, and true sincerity in delivering what the client expects.
Value Created
- Gained reliable 24/7 staffing
- Improved system availability with overnight platform monitoring
- Reduced time to validate servers post-patching by 75%
- Minimized service requests by implementing self-service password reset
- Streamlined new agent onboarding
