Operational Excellence - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 402

Chapter 20. Operational Excellence
A company can seize extraordinary opportunities only if it is very good at the or-
dinary operations.
—Marcel Telles
This chapter is about measuring or assessing the quality of service operations. It proposes
an assessment tool and gives examples of how to use it to evaluate an individual service, a
team, or multiple teams.
In Chapter 19 , we discussed how to create KPIs that drive desired behavior to achieve
specific goals. This chapter describes an assessment system that evaluates the degree of
formalityandoptimizationofprocesses—thatis,whetherprocessesareadhoc,orformal,or
actively optimized. This assessment is different than KPIs in that it gauges teams on a more
generic level, one that is more comparable across teams or across services within a team.
Such assessments help identify areas of improvement. We can then make changes, reas-
sess, and measure the improvement. If we do this periodically, we create an environment of
continuous improvement.
20.1 What Does Operational Excellence Look Like?
What does great system administration look like? Like art and literature, it is difficult to
define other than to say you know it when you see it. This ambiguity makes it difficult to
quantitatively measure how well or poorly a system administration team is performing.
High-performingorganizationshavesmoothoperations,well-designedpoliciesandprac-
tices, and discipline in what they do. They meet or exceed the needs of their customers and
delight them with innovations that meet future needs often before such needs ever surface.
The organization is transparent about how it plans, operates, provides services, and handles
costs or charge-backs to customers. The vast majority of customers are happy customers.
Even dissatisfied customers feel they have a voice, are heard, and have a channel to escal-
ate their issues. Everyone feels the operations organization moves the company forward. Its
funding reflects a reasonable budget for the work the organization does. The organization
makes its successes visible and, more importantly, is honest and forthright when it comes
to discussing its own faults. The organization is constantly improving. Outages and escal-
ated issues result in action plans that reduce future occurrences of that problem. The world
is constantly changing, and the organization incorporates new technologies and techniques
to improve its inner workings as well as the services it provides.