Operational Excellence - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 411

Figure 20.2: Roll-up to assess a team
Both of these spreadsheets should be filled out by the team as a group exercise. The
manager's role is to hold everyone to high standards for accuracy. The manager should not
do this assessment on his or her own and surprise the team with the result. A self-assess-
ment has an inherent motivational factor; being graded by a manager is demotivating at
best.
20.4.4 Acting on the Results
We can now determine which services need the most improvement and, within each ser-
vice, identify the problem areas.
Determine which projects will fix the areas that are both low assessment and for which
improvements wouldhave alargeimpact. That is,focusonthe most needed improvements
for the most important services.
Level 3 is often good enough for most services. Unless it is directly revenue generating
or has highly demanding requirements, generally one should achieve “a solid 3” across
most responsibilities before expending effort on projects that would result in achieving
Level 4 or 5.
Work on the selected projects during the next quarter. At the start of the next quarter,
repeat the assessment, update the spreadsheet, and repeat the process.