Things are Virtually Changing . . . For the Better!

Even if you flip the switch,
it's still a change.

We have made some significant changes to our VM service and transitioned them into operation. It's is a great time to share with you where we are with our efforts around virtualization. We continue to move in the right direction towards offering a solution that is affordable, safe, and effective for our patrons in the Health System.

Why are we doing this?

Nothing is worse than losing days, months, or years worth of work. This service exists to reduce the risk of bad things happening to IT equipment and research data running in labs, offices, and closets.

What do you do?

We keep work safe by providing managed resources, consulting and support for applicatiuons, daily backups, quick restores, and a secure environment for their work.

In addition, the marketplace now provides our patrons with the ability to create resources in a way that is as easy as buying a custom t-shirt off Etsy. This introduces a new element of risk as customers can now buy cloud resources without understanding the impact it may have on their research. As patron demand for cloud resources grows, we need to help manage risk by making it safe and effective to provision resources through MSIS.

To help with this we now have a Virtual Server Team which helps customers navigate the sea of available options in a way that keeps them safe.

Is it working?

We originally launched our new Virtual Server Service last year, and over the past few months have been improving what we do and how we do it. We have made improvements by:

Implementing a new VM provisioning process built around a cross-functional team empowered to ask questions, and make decisions around our investment in Virtual Servers.
Seeking feedback from internal stakeholders and working through those ideas constructively with the people who are responsible for implementing the service.
Improving communications with customers by asking more questions, and getting more information up front.
Empowering Solutions Center employees to experiment and try new things using lean huddlesn to make the service better.

You can see the results we have achieved. We have reduced the variability from+-83 days to +- 35 days, and the aveage time to deliver from 51 days to 27 days. Just this week we've chopped the amount of outstanding requests over two weeks old in half. So yeah...It's working.

We're not done yet. Our goal is to minimize the variability and get requests fulfilled in two weeks. In this way, we become a dependable, consistent provider of Virtualization Services.

This has been a long road of experimentation, improvement, learning and adjusting to get a technical service moving to the right place. We’d like to recognize: