Blog post -
Breaking down silos with collaborative tools and a new way of working
By Johan Görsjö
The latest innovations in technology have significantly shaped the way we collaborate, connect and interact, and are helping us work in completely new ways in the tech and video industry.
Delivering compelling video services is not a one-person task. Just getting assets from the ingest – whether live or on-demand – to consumers’ video screen at the right quality and cost, requires expertise and work from multiple teams and infrastructures. This is even more true now than it was 20 years ago when video and IPTV started to take off – today’s video services are much more diverse and are targeting many different consumption platforms.
HOW TO TRACK AND OPTIMIZE IN REAL-TIME
Understanding in real-time how video services can be optimized and managed requires input and coordination between several teams. The highly dynamic environment of ABR and OTT technologies also drive fast changes with new features and updated platforms and applications. This leads to the development cadence being much higher than before.
In the last years, we have seen a change in the way of working, where collaborative tools have taken a big role. Using chat and collaborative platforms to perform the day-to-day task of building and delivering services and products, has become an integral part of the way of working for most service providers and vendors.
This was the driver for us to increase the collaborative and social aspects of our products and solutions with the vision of effortlessly sharing insights between teams and team members, of course without placing any sensitive customer data at risk.
HOW SLACK AND TEAMS BOOST TROUBLESHOOTING
By linking Agama views, information, and alerts directly into Teams or Slack, team members can quickly communicate the service performance and customer experience issues to the right party.
The system keeps track of such messages and escalations, so team members can be sure that problems are acted upon and not missed in stressful situations with a lot of discussions and chat messages.
HOW COLLABORATION TOOLS ARE SHAPING OUR WAY OF WORKING
Some key benefits of integrating collaboration tools are:
- By sharing insights and information directly into the collaboration tools you likely already use, you pass the information to the teams faster.
- By making everyone see the same picture, all teams and team members can align on the same ground truth. This is the key to get everyone into a problem-fixing mindset and stopping any blamestorming activities, which unfortunately can otherwise easily happen.
- With objective analytics and monitoring information directly available in the chat, it is much easier to create transparency on the current state of a service and ongoing activities. Transparency is a fundamental requirement for good decision-making in different teams.
Any analytics solution that aims to support processes and activities today, needs to be possible to integrate with the collaboration tools that are widely in use in the video industry. We are excited to have started that journey last year and look forward to extending and optimizing this functionality.
Thank you for reading. I’d be glad to hear your opinion on what would be the next step in improving collaboration between teams.
About Johan Görsjö
Johan leads the Product Management team, responsible for revolutionizing Agama’s products and solutions. He works with Product Strategy and closely with Development and Sales.
Johan has over 20 years of experience in the Telecom and Video industry.
