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Filling the Process and Framework Skills Gap

By Donna Knapp For many organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed one of two ends of a spectrum: poorly defined processes, or overly-rigorous processes. At either end of the spectrum, these organizations likely struggled to adapt as the pandemic impacted our lives. For those with poorly defined processes, things were probably pretty chaotic. For those with overly-rigorous processes, things were most certainly taking way too long. Even organizations with well-defined processes felt, and continue to feel, pressure to speed up the flow of work, minimize toil, and automate processes where possible. To do this, they must develop a culture of continuous improvement and learning. Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve all aspects of an organization; its people, processes, tools, products, services, and experiences… all of which are tightly integrated. Whether improvements are large or small, what matters most is that they are constant. The highest performing organizations a

Why Am I Excited to Teach Site Reliabilty Engineering (SRE) Foundation?

I really like teaching Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation course.  I find it really effective to link SRE Foundation to the learners’ needs of incorporating SRE core concepts to ITSM and DevOps (and any other framework!)  This course allows me to explain how SRE improves operational excellence and quality, a key performance measure for ITSM. It also allows me to explain how SRE improves Automation, not only with the DevOps pipeline, but also how Ops uses this data to improve the flow of work into operations, and then automate repetitive tasks by utilizing tools (e.g., ChatOps).  Most importantly, SRE improves collaboration with customers, defining Service Level Objectives (SLO’s) so that IT consistently achieves (and exceeds) customers’ expectations AND delivers VALUE for the organization.  Automated monitoring is NOT enough these days, we must include observability, using automation to manage security, and ultimately delivering improved IT service quality to the business.

ITIL® 4: It’s time to focus on people, not just SLAs

Originally posted on DevClass , June 22,2021 written by Joseph Martins and sponsored by Axelos Experience is everything when it comes to delivering IT-enabled products and services. But it’s no longer about how many deadlines your team smashed, how often you’d exceeded service-level agreements (SLAs), or how many lines of code you’ve spat out. Rather it’s about how the services and products you deliver impact the rest of the organisation’s ability to do their jobs, increase productivity, deliver customer satisfaction and co-create value. “Experience” may be seen as subjective, even ephemeral, compared to the traditional IT metrics, deadlines and SLAs. But if you want proof of its importance, consider how ITIL® 4, the latest revision of the best practice framework for service management from AXELOS, focuses on improving user experience of digital services and how this enhances productivity right across the organisation. Ian Aitchison , VP Product Management at Nexthink, the leader in di

How to Hire Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): 5 Top Qualities

Guest Host Post by Jayne Groll previously posted on The Enterprisers Project , May 13, 2021 The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role continues to gain momentum in enterprise IT. Hiring managers, consider this advice on how to spot a strong candidate. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) continues to gain momentum among IT organizations. According to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, 47 percent of survey respondents (up from 28 percent in 2020) say SRE is a must-have process and framework skill. As the demand for strong SRE skills rises, so does SRE hiring . However, a challenge for business and hiring managers is determining which skills, traits, and competencies make a strong site reliability engineer. I asked several DevOps Institute Ambassadors and SRE subject matter experts to weigh in on what makes a great SRE. Here’s what they had to say: 1. "Great SREs have a passion for high-quality automation . They have a lot of ideas about automation of toilsome prod

Happy Retirement ITIL© v3 Foundation! Passing the Torch to ITIL 4!

Retirement is a time that marks a new beginning. It’s a major transition that isn’t always easy. This is  true whether it relates to the retirement of people, or a technology, or as is the case with ITIL v3 Foundation, a certification. Like other major transitions, the retirement of ITIL v3 Foundation has sparked a variety of emotions and concerns. On a positive note, we can look back fondly on ITIL v3 and celebrate the progress that it has enabled us to make in terms of promoting the value of service management. It helped us to understand what processes are and the importance of continually improving those processes. It also paved the way for us to understand the importance of aligning service management with business requirements. Concerns, however, have started to creep in. Is ITIL v3 enough in the digital age? Or perhaps more importantly, is ITIL v3 too much when viewed through the lens of adjacent ways of work such as Agile, Lean, and DevOps? Have our processes become unnecessaril

ITIL® 4: It’s time to focus on people, not just SLAs

Originally posted on devclass.com, June 22, 2021 and written by Joseph Martins. Sponsored Experience is everything when it comes to delivering IT-enabled products and services. But it’s no longer about how many deadlines your team smashed, how often you’d exceeded service-level agreements (SLAs), or how many lines of code you’ve spat out. Rather it’s about how the services and products you deliver impact the rest of the organisation’s ability to do their jobs, increase productivity, deliver customer satisfaction and co-create value. “Experience” may be seen as subjective, even ephemeral, compared to the traditional IT metrics, deadlines and SLAs. But if you want proof of its importance, consider how ITIL® 4, the latest revision of the best practice framework for service management from AXELOS, focuses on improving user experience of digital services and how this enhances productivity right across the organisation. Ian Aitchison, VP Product Management at Nexthink, the leader in digital

Upskilling Your Service Management Office (SMO)

By Donna Knapp and Jeff Jensen Let’s answer the obvious question first. What is a service management office (SMO)? ITIL® describes an SMO as a “group or department that functions as a center of excellence for service management, ensuring continual development and the consistent application of management practices across an organization.” So given that service management is a “set of specialized organizational capabilities for enabling value for customers in the form of services”, it is the SMO that helps the organization to develop these capabilities. A SMO can be formalized and have significant authority to drive service management in the organization, or it can be less-formal teams focused on continual development of the organization’s management practices. In some organizations, the SMO provides a management structure for the various practice/process owners and managers to report into. This also allows for a roll-up of enterprise metrics and reporting, and in some cases provides

We’re Good With ITIL® v3… or Are We?

By Donna Knapp We sometimes hear from organizations that they are “good with ITIL® v3”. We’d like to encourage an alternative point of view. AXELOS launched ITIL 4 in February 2019 and since then, the world has changed dramatically. COVID-19 has taught us all that the need for organizations to undergo a digital transformation is paramount to survival, as is the need to understand and leverage emerging disruptive technologies. But let’s be honest, that’s been the case long before a global pandemic changed our landscape. The gap between those able to benefit from the digital age and those who are not has been widening since the 1990s. What COVID-19 has done is accelerate the digital transformation processes in organizations. According  to a McKinsey survey of executives, “companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years”. Let’s accept the reality of that… things have sped up dramatically,

Integrating ITSM and DevOps

As the pace of technological innovation increases and digital disruption becomes the norm, the need to adapt and accelerate IT service management (ITSM) processes is more critical than ever. It’s no longer a debate about whether ITSM and DevOps should interface; it’s time now for ITSM professionals to understand how the practices they use to co-create value can underpin (or undermine) the flow of work and pervasive use of automation in a DevOps environment. It’s easy to understand why ITSM professionals are skeptical about DevOps. ITSM performance metrics and service level agreements (SLAs) often revolve around the IT organization’s ability to mitigate risks, minimize impact, and “guarantee” availability. On the surface, these measures aren’t bad. It’s when we sacrifice speed, agility, and innovation in the process that the business starts to suffer. Even with the evolution to ITIL 4 , the what and why of ITSM haven’t changed. A customer-focused culture in which everyone understands