Operational Excellence - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 416

are created and decommissioned), and performance and efficiency (how cost-effectively
resources are used).
Each operational responsibility is assessed as being at one of five levels, reflecting the
Capability Maturity Model (CMM) levels used in software engineering. The CMM is a set
of maturity levels for assessing processes: Initial (ad hoc), Repeatable (documented, auto-
mated), Defined (roles and responsibilities are agreed upon), Managed (decisions are data-
driven),andOptimizing(improvementsaremadeandtheresultsmeasured).Thefirstthree
levels of the CMM are the most important; the other levels are often attempted only for
high-value services.
The eight responsibilities of a service are individually assessed. These numbers are
rolled up to create a single assessment of the service. Teams are typically responsible for
many services. The individual service assessments are rolled up to assess the team, usually
via a weighted average since not all services are equally important. These assessments can
be used to rank teams.
By doing assessments periodically, progress can be tracked on the service, team, or or-
ganization level. High-ranking teams should be encouraged to share their best practices so
others may adopt them.
The goal is to make improvements and measure their effectiveness by seeing if the as-
sessment changes.Thegoalshouldnotbetoimprovetheassessment ortoachieve anaver-
age assessment across a set of services.
UsingassessmentstodrivedecisionsinITbringsusclosertoasystemofscientificman-
agement for system administration and moves us away from “gut feelings” and intuition.
The importance of the first three levels of the CMM is that they take us away from ad hoc
processesandindividualheroicsandcreaterepeatableprocessesthataremoreefficientand
of higher quality.
Exercises
1. Why is it difficult to assess the quality of operations work, or to compare two dif-
ferent operations teams?
2. Describe the five Capability Maturity Model (CMM) levels.
3. Rank the eight “operational responsibilities” from most important to least import-
ant. Justify your ranking.
4. In what ways could assessments become too bureaucratic and how might one pre-
vent this?
5. Why is the mathematical mode recommended when rolling up a service's assess-
ments, and a weighted average used when rolling up a team's assessments?