Operational Excellence - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 404

20.3 Assessment Methodology
This assessment methodology is a bottom-up assessment. A service is evaluated on eight
attributes, called operational responsibilities (OR) . Each OR is assessed to be at one of
five levels, with 5 being best. If assessment is done periodically, one can see progress over
time. A weighted average can be used to roll up the eight individual assessments to arrive
at a single number representing the service.
A team performs this assessment on each service. A team can be assessed using the
weighted average of the services it provides. Teams can then be compared by stack rank.
Teams can seek to improve their rank by identifying problem areas to work on. Best prac-
tices of high-ranking teams can be identified and shared.
Theeight coreORsaregeared towardservice management anddonotfitwell fortrans-
actionalITservicessuchasahelpdeskorotherfront-of-house,tier1,orothercustomer-fa-
cing service center.
20.3.1 Operational Responsibilities
We have identified eight broad categories of operational responsibilities that most services
have.Somemaybemoreorlessimportantforaparticularservice.Yourteammayemphas-
ize or de-emphasize certain ORs by using a weighted average when performing roll-ups.
Teams may also choose to add more ORs if need be.
The eight common operational responsibilities are as follows:
• Regular Tasks (RT): How normal, non-emergency, operational duties are
handled; that is, how work is received, queued, distributed, processed, and veri-
fied, plus how periodic tasks are scheduled and performed.
• Emergency Response (ER): How outages and disasters are handled. This includes
technical and non-technical processes performed during and after outages (re-
sponse and remediation). This is the stuff of Chapters 6 , 14 , and 15 .
• Monitoring and Metrics (MM): Collecting and using data to make decisions.
Monitoring collects data about a system. A metric uses that data to measure a
quantifiable component of performance. This is the stuff of Chapters 16 , 17 , and
19 .
• Capacity Planning (CP): Determining future resource needs. Capacity planning
involves the technical work of understanding how many resources are needed per
unit of growth, plus non-technical aspects such as budgeting, forecasting, and sup-
ply chain management. This is the stuff of Chapter 18 .