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Standard Operations and Maintenance

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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 using other ITSM practices as appropriate.

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 and control, greater potential for an “outage.”
  • Emergency: Implement as soon as possible (e.g., to resolve an incident or apply a security patch). Expedited assessment and authorization, an “outage” may already exist.

The bulk of what might be considered “Standard Operations and Maintenance” should be handled through Standard Changes, which are associated with business-as-usual activities. Standard Changes may also apply in cases like routine incident resolutions.

We should use Change Enablement to ensure changes are controlled and that the organization’s needs are being met. This includes enabling desired outcomes, balancing risk, and meeting requirements for change throughput—the number of changes made and the speed of implementation.

Education to consider to dive deeper:



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