BPI Project Proposal (Group 1)

Cisco Company Introduction

Cisco is an international networking giant that has ventured into many technologies and services. It was
founded in 1984. Cisco hit off the world with its IP based networking and hasn’t turned back since then.
Cisco is everywhere from routers, switches to data centers, servers, security, telecommunication services
and solutions. Cisco has been identified as a world leader in networking technology by IDC. With a heavy
revenue base of $49.3bn and presence in over 65 countries, Cisco can be broadly classified into majorly
5 parts, the business/engineering units, sales department, services, strategy and functions (IT, Legal, HR
etc). This report would majorly centered on one of the teams of services department called now as the
customer experience team.

CX (Customer Experience Team)

The customer experience in Cisco is part of the Services umbrella, which basically assists the pre-sales
and after sales operations and have a major contribution in attracting new as well as retaining existing
customers. These include network design, installations, deployment, operation maintenance, service
recovery and security. Customer experience team operates within mainly 3 geographies namely Poland,
US and India. The CX team was previously known as the Global Delivery Center as it used to assist field
teams and sales teams from across the globe in the above mentioned operations and technologies from
these geographies. Out of the various deliveries being done by the CX team, our group would like to
focus on the software risk analysis part of the delivery. This mainly includes identifying the risk exposure
for the software supported on Cisco’s hardware devices. We would also want to limit the analysis to
Poland and India team and technologies to Routing, Switching and Data Center technologies as these
constitute majority of the work carried out for the same.

Process

Every software release is followed by analysis of the associated risks in the form of bugs related to and
impacting the deployed network design including but not limited to topology, configurations, protocols
being used, services deployed on supporting routers and connecting devices. The customers are
categorized as per their revenue for the team and constitute different levels of service. Each customer
account is supported by a set of network engineers and the highest revenue generating customers are
provided with higher number of engineers. The analysis part takes place in the following manner:

1) Customer provides the technical information (network, configurations etc)

2) Engineers match the configuration with data available for the release to identify impact
3) Engineers then jointly discuss with customer and engineering to fix few of the risks and identify
workaround for rest. The intellectual capital built is collaborated across teams and with
engineering teams.

The scale of operations is so much that a team of 200 people is working on different types of requests,
engineers end up doing the same repeated work across customers, leading to increasing frustration of
working and less accuracy and more errors. Multiple initiatives have been taken in the past to improve the
quality including automation, joint projects with engineering team to improve documentation, customer
specific analysis but every time it ends up with almost same results. We aim to study this process and
suggest improvements such that error rate reduces and understand the scope of what all can be
optimized.