Operational Excellence - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 409

Appendix A lists operational responsibilities, questions, and look-for's for each level.
Take a moment to flip there and review some of them. We'll wait.
20.4 Service Assessments
Toputthisevaluationprocessintoaction,staffmustperiodicallyperformanassessmenton
each major service or group of related services they provide. The assessment is used to ex-
poseareasforimprovement. Theteambrainstormswaystofixtheseproblemsandchooses
a certain number of projects to fix the highest-priority issues. These become projects for
the new quarter.
The team then repeats the process. Services are assessed. The assessment inspires new
projects. The projects are worked on. The services are assessed. The process then begins
again. Teams that work this way benefit from having a structure in place that determines
projects. They always know what they should be working on.
20.4.1 Identifying What to Assess
First, identify the major services that your organization provides. A web-based service
might identify the major components of the service (major feature groups served by soft-
ware components) and infrastructure services such as networks, power, cooling, and Inter-
net access. An enterprise IT organization might identify the major applications provided to
the company (e.g., email, file storage, centralized compute farm, desktop/laptop fleet man-
agement), plus infrastructure services such as DNS, DHCP, ActiveDirectory/LDAP, NTP,
and so on. Smaller sites may group services together (DNS, DHCP, and ActiveDirectory/
LDAP might be “name services”), and larger sites may consider each individual compon-
ent its own service. Either way, construct your list of major services.
For each service, assess the service's eight operational responsibilities. Each section in
Appendix A lists questions that will help in this assessment. These questions are generic
and should apply to most services. You may wish to add additional questions that are ap-
propriate for your organization or for a particular service. It is important to use the same
questions for each assessment so that the numbers are comparable. Make a reference docu-
ment that lists which questions are used.
20.4.2 Assessing Each Service
During each assessment period, record the assessment number (1 through 5) along with
notes that justify the assessment. Generally these notes are in the form of answers to the
questions.
Figure 20.1 shows an example spreadsheet that could be used to track the assessment
ofaservice. Thefirstcolumnlists theeightoperational responsibilities. Theothercolumns