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Visible Ops & Agile Service Management

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 poor

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 Geor

Service Management - Education vs. Training

Although these terms are frequently used synonymously, “Training” is not “Education”.   This is not to say that training is not important because without training, education would be incomplete.  When investing your capital to increase performance and change behavior it could be beneficial to understand the distinction. Education When we are educated we learn facts, theory or required details about the who, what, where, when and why of a particular subject.  Sometimes education will build on a foundation of knowledge so that you may become more expert in that area.  A simple example is given with the idea of a language.  You may know how to speak it.  When you go to school and are educated you learn what a verb is, and how adjectives are used.  We learn the syntax and constructs of the language.  Some move on to be expert linguist. They become educated and highly skilled in the subject of language. When you are attending a Service Management or DevOps course you are learning

IT Ops or IT Slops? Definitions Matter: Part One

This blog was written by Kevin Behr, co-author of Visible Ops You can visit Kevin's blog at: http://blog.kevinbehr.com/ “I wish we had dedicated project resources. I am so busy with operations that I just don’t have time for projects.” “Why does every IT issue get escalated to my top network and security people?” “I don’t care if you have enough time. I need this stuff done now.” “It takes me more time to fill out a change request than to make the actual change.” “We spend over 70% of our time doing operations which only leaves me 10-15% to work on projects after I read my email.” Sound Familiar? I love the provocative statement that Goldratt made (I paraphrase): “Technology CAN (not does) provide value IF and only IF it diminishes a business constraint.” Before you go off emailing me that technology has many other values please reflect deeply on this statement. Please reflect deeply on what business value IT provides. I love the notion of continuity that the “diminishes” brings to