Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
people to deal with just exceptions and problems. If a process has many com-
plex handoffs between teams, a system that provides a status dashboard and
automatically notifies teams when hand-offs happen can reduce the need for
legions of project managers.
• The best process optimization is elimination. A task that is eliminated does not
need to be performed or maintained, nor will it have bugs or security flaws.
For example, if production machines run three different operating systems,
narrowing that number down to two eliminates a lot of work. If you provide a
service to other service teams and require a lengthy approval process for each
new team, it may be better to streamline the approval process by automatically
approving certain kinds of users.
7.2 Service Life Cycle
Operations is responsible for the entire
service life cycle
: launch, maintenance
(both regular and emergency), upgrades, and decommissioning. Each phase has
unique requirements, so you'll need a strategy for managing each phase differ-
ently.
The stages of the life cycle are:
•
Service Launch:
Launching a service the first time. The service is brought to
life, initial customers use it, and problems that were not discovered prior to the
launch are discovered and remedied. (
Section 7.2.1
)
•
Emergency Tasks:
Handling exceptional or unexpected events. This includes
handling outages and, more importantly, detecting and fixing conditions that
precipitate outages. (
Chapter 14
)
•
Nonemergency Tasks:
Performing all manual work required as part of the
normally functioning system. This may include periodic (weekly or monthly)
maintenance tasks (for example, preparation for monthly billing events) as
well as processing requests from users (for example, requests to enable the ser-
vice for use by another internal service or team). (
Section 7.3
)
•
Upgrades:
Deploying new software releases and hardware platforms. The bet-
ter we can do this, the more aggressively the company can try new things and
innovate. Each new software release is built and tested before deployment.
Tests include system tests, done by developers, as well as user acceptance tests
(UAT), done by operations. UAT might include tests to verify there are no
per-
formance regressions
(unexpected declines in performance). Vulnerability as-
sessments are done to detect security issues. New hardware must go through a
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