McGraw-Hill Takes Control of Critical Incidents with Exigence
With Exigence we don’t have to wait 20-40 minutes to get people into an incident ‘war room’.
With the Exigence Situation Room, we invite people instantly through the platform, which sends out text messages, emails, or other.
And, we can take care of exactly what we need to at exactly the right time.”
Joe Roach,
Vice President of Global IT Operations & Infrastructure at McGraw-Hill
The Critical Impact of Incidents
McGraw-Hill (MH), a SaaS-based education services company, was experiencing an average of 8-10 critical incidents on a monthly basis. These could be issues with applications, servers or ports going down, networking issues that compromise the connectivity of entire offices or data centers, a broken down router switch, or development issues such as problematic code that needs to be fixed.
When these incidents hit, customers would call into the company’s support center reporting that they couldn’t log in to mission critical products or to complain about app performance issues.
Needless to say, the impact of critical incidents on customer satisfaction – and on employee productivity – had the potential to be severe.
The Goal
• Gain full control of critical incidents
• Quickly align stakeholders, including
external service providers
• Expedite resolution
• Streamline the post-mortem
The Need for Speed . . .
and Accuracy and Structure
For MH to mitigate the risks of critical incidents the team needed to overcome some of the typical challenges to effective incident management, including:
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Quickly onboarding and aligning
the incident team and stakeholders
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Ensuring that all required action items
were executed immediately and effectively
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Sending timely and accurate status updates
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Taking comprehensive, actionable notes
during each call and meeting
These were all manual processes that were also often prone to error.
Moreover, there was no incident timeline on record, nor clear and easily accessible documentation on how past issues were resolved.
The post-mortem was also difficult to perform since the stakeholders involved with the incident were almost impossible to reach once the resolution had been completed.
We were looking at three or four other systems, but none had the timeline and the integration to all the tools we’re already using.
Only Exigence could bring that. It’s great to finally be able to pull everything together visually into one central location and to be able to collaborate on a call quickly with access to all the information in one place.”
Remarkable Results
Now it takes only 1-2 minutes vs. 30-40, to get everyone aligned and on the same page, working together effectively and efficiently to resolve an incident.
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MH support person opens P1 incident in ServiceNow
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ServiceNow opens new incident in Exigence
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Exigence contacts the appropriate teams and on-call service delivery manager (SDM)
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The incident is created, WebEx bridge is opened, Slack channel is created
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Stakeholders join the Exigence Situation Room
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The team is onboarded, aligned, and updated
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The Situation Room centralizes incident management and documentation
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Incident manager closes the incident
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Exigence automatically sets incident status to ‘resolved’
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Exigence notifies full incident team of incident closure
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Exigence incident recordings drive reporting, incident summary, root cause analysis, and building new knowledge
The Exigence platform was selected to enable control of critical incidents and to bring simplicity to a complex process, as well as to centralize incident management through one unified interface for both internal and external stakeholders.
MH can now leverage the Exigence Situation Room as a virtual meeting space for enabling collaboration among cross-organizational and external teams.
Moreover, all teams can continue to use their favorite tools through seamless integration with, for example, ServiceNow, Slack, and WebEx.
Everyone is always on the same page, roles and responsibilities are clear, outstanding tasks are visible to all, managers are continually and automatically updated, and everything is always documented in the Exigence Timeline.
McGraw-Hill’s
Powerful New Process
Why Exigence
Simple and clear dashboard of all incident management tasks and actions
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One centralized repository for real-time knowledge access and management
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Available on all user devices, including mobile phone, tablet, and desktop
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Open and system agnostic, connected via APIs with any organizational system
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SaaS-based (Amazon AWS)
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Seamless integration and optimization of all relevant incident management tools
“We love the Exigence Timeline – because now we can always know exactly what happened, when it happened, and with whom. It’s easy to create and accessible at any time.”
Solution Highlights
About the Exigence Platform
The Exigence platform provides complete command and control of critical incidents, whether for technology operations, security, or drills and business continuity tests.
It uniquely addresses every aspect of the incident, going far beyond ticketing and alerting by integrating all of the organization’s incident related systems and providing a unified interface with automated workflows and orchestration.
The platform also automatically coordinates all stakeholders and systems all the time, manages complex processes from trigger to resolution, simplifying the post-mortem, and enables the organization to leverage lessons learned for ongoing optimization.
Through its unique approach to critical incidents with unprecedented integration and automation, Exigence turns an unstructured situation into one that is structured and easy to manage, delivering unmatched control, clarity, and speed.
About McGraw-Hill
McGraw-Hill (MH) is a learning science company that delivers personalized learning experiences that drive results for students, parents, educators and professionals. The company focuses on educational equity, affordability and learning success to help learners build better lives. Headquartered in New York City, McGraw-Hill has offices across North America, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and South America, and makes its learning solutions for PreK-12, higher education, professionals and others available in more than 75 languages.
About Exigence
Exigence was founded in 2016 in heart of the ‘Silicon Wadi’ in Israel. The Exigence team brings extensive experience in complex, cross-organizational workflows, optimizing operations, global IT and IS organizations, cloud-based computing, and ideating – developing – and bringing to market technology solutions for strategic business challenges.
Learn more at www.exigence.io.
