Skip to main content

Visible Ops

Anyone who has worked in Information Technology knows that today, there is and always will be improvement opportunities available to our organizations.  This is especially in light of the pace of change that is taking place in all market spaces and the level of customer expectations that accompanies that change.

If you have worked in IT for a number of years, you may remember when change was not welcomed. Well the good old days weren’t always that good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems (Billy Joel).  The challenge is in getting started.

If…….
·       the processes that are currently being engaged are not as efficient and effective as you would like
·       you are finding that your environment isn’t as stable and reliable as it should be
·       that when you make changes to your environment it generally results in an outage and prolonged and repeatable firefighting

then …….
I recommend that you read The Visible Ops Handbook by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford.  Visible Ops can provide a roadmap for IT to begin the journey to becoming a high performing IT organization that can deliver expected service levels and availability.  Ensure that changes can be made with confidence. Consistent integration between processes across the lifecycle and the ability to reduce unplanned work.

There are four phases to Visible Ops.  We will briefly review them here.

·       Phase 1: “Stabilize the patient” – We begin by reducing the number of outages by only allowing changes to be made within a defined maintenance window.  Of course this policy change must be communicated to all stake holders.  We also ensure that both Problem and Incident Management are aware of the schedule of changes during these maintenance windows and who the accountable parties for these changes are. (Resolution Processes)

·       Phase 2: “Catch & release” and “Find the fragile artifacts” – Often, infrastructure and applications exist that cannot be easily or repeatedly replicated quickly.  It will be necessary to document configuration items (CIs) including services, so that we can identify those areas with the lowest change success rates, highest MTTR and highest business downtime costs. Understanding which services are the most critical to the business is an absolute must.  This way fragility in the environment can be easily identified, and greater risk analysis can be focused on those areas.  The results should be a drastic drop in unplanned work. (Control Processes)

·       Phase 3: “Establish a repeatable build library” - What we are accomplishing with this step is creating repeatable builds for those assets that support critical services.  This makes it financially feasible to move from a philosophy of repair to rebuild in dealing with outages. (Release Processes)

Phase 4: “Enabling Continuous Improvement” - The first three phases have established a closed loop between the release, control and resolution process domains.  The fourth phase engages in the use of meaningful metrics to enable continuous improvement.  Remember “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.  If you can’t manage it, then you can’t improve it”.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ps of Service Design - It’s not all about Technology

People ask me why I think that many designs and projects often fail. The most common answer is from a lack of preparation and management. Many IT organizations just think about the technology (product) implementation and fail to understand the risks of not planning for the effective and efficient use of the four Ps: People, Process, Products (services, technology and tools) and Partners (suppliers, manufacturers and vendors). A holistic approach should be adopted for all Service Design aspects and areas to ensure consistency and integration within all activities and processes across the entire IT environment, providing end to end business-related functionality and quality. (SD 2.4.2) People:   Have to have proper skills and possess the necessary competencies in order to get involved in the provision of IT services. The right skills, the right knowledge, the right level of experience must be kept current and aligned to the business needs. Products:   These are the technology managem

What Is A Service Offering?

The ITIL4 Best Practice Guidance defines a “Service Offering” as a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target customer or group .   As a service provider, we can’t stop there!   We must know what the contracts of our service offering are and be able to put them into context as required by the customer.     Let’s explore the three elements that comprise a Service Offering. A “Service Offering” may include:     Goods, Access to Resources, and Service Actions Goods – When we think of “Goods” within a service offering these are the items where ownership is transferred to the consumer and the consumer takes responsibility for the future use of these goods.   Example of goods that are being provided in the offering – If this is a hotel service than toiletries or chocolates are yours to take with you.   You the consumer own these and they are yours to take with you.               Note: Goods may not always be provided for every Service

What is the difference between Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner?

I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share this with you. Roles and Responsibilities: Process Owner – this individual is “Accountable” for the process. They are the goto person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented. They will ensure that the process has a set of Policies for governance. Example: The process owner for Incident management will ensure that all of the activities to Identify, Record, Categorize, Investigate, … all the way to closing the incident are defined and documented with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, handoffs, and deliverables.  An example of a policy in could be… “All Incidents must be logged”. Policies are rules that govern the process. Process Owner ensures that all Process activities, (what to do), Procedures (details on how to perform the activity) and th