Job one for IT shops is to deliver robust production services. With 25 years of experience turning around medium and large IT shops performance, especially their production availability and quality, I have learned and collected the best practices and key techniques to enable outstanding production performance. The typical, even average, availability improvement for the shops we transformed was a 90% reduction in incidents and customer impact. Many experienced a 95% or greater reduction that was both sustained and maintained with increased rates of change. These remarkable improvements enable IT shops to become a competitive advantage for their companies, especially in the age of digitalization and increasing demands by customer for service at any time, all the time.
Production performance should be an area of focus for any IT shop looking to achieve competitive advantage and enable better business performance. The best practices we review here are experience-tested and enduring. They are as valid today as 5 or 10 years ago. They work in large shops or small shops. They work for legacy systems and brand new, fully digital systems. If you want to significantly improve your service to your customers or reduce fixes, re-work and incidents, then these practices are a proven way to achieve your goals. The IT production best practices are covered in the following reference pages:
- Where to Start to Improve Availability
- During the Heat of Battle: Command Center Best Practices
- High Quality Operational Execution: The Four Eyes Principle
- Production Metrics
- Proper Release Management
- Stable? How to get to Great Availability
Further, you or your team can review this video presentation on how to tackle and improve availability.
I will be building this section out to provide a strong base of knowledge including templates and examples for any organization on a journey of improvement. It is important to view the IT shop not as a set of craftsmen but a collection of several small factories, which, with the right goals and accountabilities coupled with disciplined best practice approaches will enable you to achieve outstanding results.
Please do not hesitate to send me a comment if you have questions or seek clarification on any of these areas.
Best, Jim Ditmore