Behind the scenes in every successful business is a team of powerful and integral people. Citi is no different. Although many see Citi as a power in global banking and financial services, we see them as ENGINEERS, keeping it running successfully!
Understanding Citi:
In May 2022, Citi approached SDN Pros with the following challenges:
- IT Operations struggling to troubleshoot and triage certain aspects of their network
- Citi needed a solution spanning multiple regions and time zones
- Citi’s goal was to reduce time to resolution by solving more in-house vs. calling Arista TAC
The standard of Arista ACE Training courses have much of what they needed to know, but Citi wanted something more specific for their environment, challenges and people.
Challenges and Goals:
- Increase in-house triage and troubleshooting capabilities.
- Very difficult to take operations people out of their jobs for 4-5 days training.
- Create ongoing educational and operational support, not just a one-time training session.
We saw the opportunity to transpose Citi’s out of house troubleshooting model to an in house triage and solutions approach leveraging Arista Training.
But we didn’t stop there…
Arista’s Custom approach:
Rather than simply addressing short term training needs, John Riley (Arista Training) responded with a ‘why stop there?’ mentality:
Let’s not just find a course that mostly addresses your needs, but tell us your top ongoing issues your operations team has, and create tailored solutions for Citi.
Working together with Arista Technical Assistance Center (TAC), John Riley and the team developed a brand new model. Together they curated content specifically to identify recurring issues, with the purpose focussed on helping Citi troubleshoot issues and problems themselves before reaching out to get help from Arista TAC.
John, Arista TAC and SDN Pro’s course designers worked together to create custom training for the Citi operations engineers!
In addition to the custom Arista training courses, the following was provided:
- Guest Instructors – Arista TAC engineers were brought in as guest speakers to provide additional insights and recommendations to Citi’s operations engineers.
- Ongoing delivery – SDN Pros continues to deliver virtual Instructor-Led custom courses to well over a hundred people within the organization with ongoing regular sessions being conducted today.
- Arista Academy Access – Continued education and the ability to reference their class, materials and additional hands-on lab time via Arista Academy.
- Feedback and Assessments – Pre and post training assessments with instructor feedback is provided for gap analyses, enabling Citi to understand where additional training and support is needed and can be provided.
- Creative Scheduling – The training wasn’t the only thing customized for Citi, we were able to get creative with scheduling, thereby reducing the amount of time Citi’s operations people were ‘out of the office’ by spreading multiple days of training across multiple teams and weeks.
Outcome:
SDN Pros and Arista Training provided a complete, tailor made operations training program for Citi. Dozens of employees have already completed training and are now able to be more effective in their jobs, troubleshooting issues efficiently and effectively without always relying on Arista TAC support.
If you are interested in exploring how custom Arista training could help your company, simply send us a message using our Contact Us form and someone from the Arista training team will be in touch.
