Standard Operations and Maintenance

I was recently asked about Standard Operations and Maintenance activities relative to the Change Enablement practice and SLAs. Here are a few thoughts.

Standard Operations and Maintenance is really something that is defined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in consultation and negotiation with the customer. It is not a determination made solely by IT or Operations. The customer or receiver of service helps to establish whether an “outage” has occurred. Because we want to adhere to the terms and conditions set forth in the SLA, strong controls should be in place.

It is not a question of whether the Change Enablement practice will be used, but rather the degree of Change Enablement that will be applied. A solid approach is to establish a clear definition of what constitutes a change in the organization.

ITIL defines a change as “the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services.” This is a broad definition and covers just about everything we do in IT.

Next, we need to identify the activities we do in IT to deliver and support services, and see if they match that definition. If they do, we must decide if we want to apply full ITSM control and tracking to that activity. This includes identifying Configuration Items, applying Incident and Problem Management, and so on, through all our established ITSM practices.

Once activities that constitute changes are identified, they can be categorized as Standard, Normal, or Emergency Changes. This helps determine the degree of Change Enablement control needed for each activity:

Standard: Low risk, pre-authorized changes, little potential for an “outage.”
Normal: Unknown, medium, or high-risk changes that require additional authorization for planning and control, greater potential for an “outage.”
Emergency: Implement as soon as possible (e.g., to resolve an incident or implement a security patch), expedited assessment and authorization, and an “outage” may already exist.

The bulk of what might be considered “Standard Operations and Maintenance” should be done using Standard Changes. In this context, Standard Changes are associated with business-as-usual situations. There may also be situations, such as standard Incident resolutions, where Standard Changes can be used as well.

We should use Change Enablement to ensure changes are controlled and that we are meeting the organization's change-related needs, rather than seeing it as an optional practice. This includes ensuring that changes enable the desired outcomes and meet the organization's requirements in terms of change throughout (the number of changes made and the speed of change realization) and risk management.

Education to consider to dive deeper:

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