Microsoft IT: Centralized Management Support Structure in detail

Service Desk
Microsoft IT currently uses a service desk team to create and assign tickets to incident and problem management teams. The service desk team documents all ticket activities, reports against SLAs, and collects metrics that can be used for problem management analysis and investigations. The service desk team also builds a knowledge database that supports repeatable process improvements and provides the Microsoft product groups with valuable feedback.

Incident Management
The primary goal of the incident management team is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible and to minimize the adverse impact on business operations, thus maintaining the best possible levels of service quality and availability.

Problem Management
The objective of the problem management team in Microsoft IT is to minimize the adverse impact on the operational ability of a business due to incidents and problems caused by errors within the IT infrastructure, and to prevent the recurrence of incidents related to these errors. To achieve this goal, the problem management team seeks to establish the root cause of incidents and then initiate actions to improve or correct the situation.

Change Management
The Microsoft IT change management team provides a disciplined process for introducing required changes into a complex IT environment with minimal disruption to ongoing operations. The change management team is also closely aligned with the release management process and manages the release and deployment of changes into the production environment.

Service Level Management
Microsoft IT developed service level management in line with the requirements and priorities of the services documented and offered in the service catalog for the business, and the specific requirements of the negotiated SLAs. Microsoft IT uses the monitoring of a service against the requirements in real time, and the reporting and reviewing of key trends in historical data, to highlight and remove failures that affect the level of performance of the service.