I highly recommend The
Visible Ops Handbook by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford.
There are a lot of intersections between Visible Ops (VisOps)
and being Agile. In fact, following
Visible Ops practices allows you to achieve an Agile perspective in a shorter
time scale.
There is an area in particular where I think alignment between
VisOps and Agile is very strong. One of the four tenets of the Agile Manifesto
is that we value “Responding to change”.
This is further underpinned by the principle “Welcome changing
requirements, even late in development”.
Agile processes harness change
for the customer’s competitive advantage.
This also ties us to the goal and
objective of Agile Service Management in “Improving IT’s entire ability to meet
customer requirements faster”.
Responding to change does not equate to bypassing process or
controls. Every business decision
triggers an IT event. Industry statistics
tell us that 80% of outages are a direct results from poorly planned, unauthorized,
undocumented or poorly executed changes that had limited risk assessment and no
back out plans. Consistent
responsiveness requires processes that are designed to be agile and adaptive.
High performing IT organizations have incorporated elements
from both this methodology and framework. As an example, Agile processes are
designed with “just enough” structure and controls. Visible Ops states CAB meetings should be
restricted to evaluating and approving RFCs.
The goal is to keep change management meetings focused on management of
change. The CAB function is to identify
which changes are risky, not come up with the solution for risk reduction. CAB
meetings should be completed within 15 minutes.
Very Agile/Scrum like, no?
In high performing IT organizations, change management is
not seen as burdensome, bureaucratic and a consumer of resources, time and
money. That’s because it is not. It is well designed with “just enough” in
place and ties success measures to business outcomes. Benefits such as
increased availability, increased changed success rate, reduction of risk and
reduction of MTTR comes often and early. This is due in part to creating a
culture of change management through integrated processes, defined accountable
and responsible roles and communication between all stakeholders.
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