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)
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