Andrew Grinsted, is the Cloud SITS Service Operations Manager at Tribal. He is responsible for the migrations of SITS into the Tribal Cloud, as well as the ongoing support and operations for SITS for our cloud customers globally.
What processes and procedures are in place to ensure the quality of the service?
We have a whole host of processes to ensure the quality of the service. This includes standard ITIL based Incident, Request and Change management processes to ensure that all issues, request are dealt with swiftly and efficiently, and in a controlled way. We also have a whole suite of Standard Operating Procedures to ensure consistency in the service that we deliver across all our cloud customers. We have a large team based here in the UK looking after SITS and the Cloud infrastructure, but we also have teams based in Singapore and Australia to provide seamless round the clock support and maintenance.
There is a SITS skills shortage, do you find it easy to get the right people?
We have been growing the cloud team over the last year to ensure that we meet the demand of our cloud customers. It has been becoming increasingly difficult to find resources in the technology space, particularly with a diverse skill sets in both Service and Applications management as well as Cloud skills. It is understandable that Universities are increasingly looking at supplier lead Software as a Service offerings, such as SITS Cloud, to manage their technology services as skills shortages have made recruiting a very competitive space.
What advice do you have for a customer considering consuming SITS as a service from Tribal (i.e. what makes an effective partnership)?
My advice would be to communicate and share ideas and concerns as widely as possible on both sides When we are working with a university on migrating SITS to the Cloud we assign a primary Technical Lead from the team who will work in partnership with the University and their team. They are also backed up by the whole of the SITS Cloud team and our Cloud Engineering department to ensure that we plan the configuration, delivery, and testing of each of their environments with them every step of the way. This continues after cut over, building on the partnership forged during migration, we actively work with the University to understand their support and maintenance routines, and ensure that this is transitioned to Tribal effortlessly.
If it’s the right time for your university to move services to the cloud and you’d like to understand more about building a business case, why not try our Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator to help you understand just how much SITS is costing now and learn more about the cost predictability a move to cloud brings.
